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