JP Munro's Overworld Captures the Extremity of the Southern California Wilds @ Broadway in New York

 
 

Broadway presents Overworld, a solo show of new paintings by Los Angeles artist JP Munro.

The exhibition comprises two enduring strains of the artist’s practice: exacting plein-air landscapes and altogether fantastical tableaux populated with a pantheon of mythical figures.

The landscapes gather their formidable power from the artist’s almost psychedelic level of observation and commitment not just to surface effect but to transmitting an experiential dimension to the canvas. A viewer immediately senses the endeavor of creating these hard-fought works amidst the beauty and extremity of the Southern California wilds. We feel each craggy outcropping of rock, every bristling shank of cactus,and the dramatic sprawl of a live oak as if in real-time and with a spiritual magnification that is unique to encounters with nature.

The figure-centered works would, at first, seem to sit in uneasy relation to the landscapes, but soon reveal themselves as an apt inversion of the former’s exteriority—fiction in place of hard fact. Picture book royalty, Norse deities, and their attendant lusty concubines inhabit mystical realms and cavort in a matrix of meticulously layered black and brown oil paint. Like a conceptualist take on William Blake, these characters hold our attention as both protagonists of the painting and somehow witnesses to its creation.

As the exhibition shifts between disciplined observation and freestyle world-building, Munro completes an expository circuit of the act of painting itself

Overworld is on view Tuesday–Saturday, 11AM–6PM through July 28th at Broadway, 375 Broadway, New York

William Crawford "More Worried Than A Worm In A Bird's Nest" @ Farago Gallery In Los Angeles

More Worried Than a Worm in a Bird’s Nest presents the drawings of William Crawford. William Crawford’s drawings were found in an abandoned house in Oakland, CA. Several of them were made on the backs of prison roster sheets dated 1997. Nothing is known about the artist except for his occasional and varying signature as Bill, William or WM Crawford. In graphite on paper, the drawings depict drug use and orgies often including a recurring male figure which suggests the artist’s self-portrait. Their drawings recall the comic tumescence in the work of Tom of Finland and the weightlessness of William Blake. Crawford’s collected drawings, of which there are hundreds, appear to have comprised several narratives consisting of images in sequences of 30 or more. These sequences, presumably broken up since their original compilation, are now fragmentary. The exhibition is the first presentation of William Crawford’s work in Los Angeles. "More Worried Than A Worm In A Bird's Nest" will be on view until December 5th, 2015 at Farago Gallery, 224, West 8th Street, Los Angeles, CA.