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Gallery Wendi Norris

September 10 - October 30, 2011

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161 Jessie Street San Francisco, CA 94105
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Natural Untitled (Sunset IV), mixed media on paper, 2011
Opening September 10th, 4 - 7pm “Natural”, Keegan Mchargue’s debut exhibition at Frey Norris, demonstrates his flexibility in transcending the limitations of new materials and synthesizing wide ranging ideas. The several dozen paintings, works on paper and two sculptures in “Natural” reflect an eclectic adventure, imagery springing from the artist’s diverse interests and varied investigations. Everything from pop and punk music to snippets of art history (Cezanne, Gaugin, Matisse and Picasso all exert themselves in sublimated ways) to McHargue’s interest in design and branding, to more emotional and personal subject matter; the artist pulls his inspiration from all corners of culture with no real adherence to a hierarchy when it comes to image making. A toilet, a cartoon figure, abstract pattern or imagery from a magazine advertisement may carry similar weight to nuanced ideas by intellectual heavyweights like Walter Benjamin, Edward Bernays or Dave Hickey. After years of focus on concept-driven shows, Mchargue has ultimately returned to his long held love of surface, playing with a 21st century reinvention of Romanticism. Humor remains, sometimes through his happy timeless characters, the Foibles. His art, which has always manipulated scale and repetition, now appears more abstract, the visual analogue of a concrete kind of poetry, jazz-like exercises in improvisation, each gesture inter-related to most others. Portions of other works may be scaled up or down and reappear in a new piece, creating fresh re-workings, reinventions of familiar themes. An interest in immediate satisfaction manifests through the collision of high formalism and a kind of loose, irreverent disregard for convention. Self-taught McHargue has shown in recent years at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Vienna and Tokyo. His writing and interviews have appeared in The Believer and Beautiful Decay and his art resides in the permanent collections of MoMA, SFMoMA and the Judith Rothschild Foundation, among others.
Natural Untitled (Crumbling Empire), mixed media on paper, 2011
Natural Untitled (Oblivion II), mixed media on paper, 2011