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

"Are You a Friend of Dorothy?" @ Hashimoto Contemporary

Justin Yoon, At Midnight, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Hashimoto Contemporary.

Justin Yoon, At Midnight, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Hashimoto Contemporary.

Hashimoto Contemporary presents Are You A Friend of Dorothy? a group exhibition featuring new works by Santiago Galeas, Jean-Paul Mallozzi, Juan Arango Palacios, Carlos Rodriguez, and Justin Yoon. Each artist explores their identity and sexuality in emotive, figurative painting to create depictions of joy, belonging, and queer intimacy.

Rooted in personal narratives and lore, all five artists have created their own visual languages to imagine queer utopias filled with safety, community, tenderness and serenity. As the Cowardly Lion said while making his way through the Land of Oz, “Any friend of Dorothy must be our friend, as well.”

Are You a Friend of Dorothy? is on view through July 8 at Hashimoto Contemporary, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd. Suite B - Los Angeles, CA

 
 

NKSIN Presents REVIVAL @ albertz benda in Los Angeles

NKSIN, S60, 2023. All images courtesy of albertz benda.

NKSIN, S60, 2023. All images courtesy of albertz benda.

In his first solo exhibition, REVIVAL, with albertz benda, Japanese-Filipino artist NKSIN will present a paintings that offer a sardonic examination of the human experience through the lens of the artist’s signature greyscale figures.

NKSIN’s monochromatic paintings tackle universal emotions — desire, envy, joy, and grief — in the age of information overload. Bombarded with an overwhelming amount of news through social media and the internet at large, NKSIN and his figures reject the adversarial effects of technology to restore the capacity to reflect and function effectively. Favoring internal reflection and exuding a sense of serenity, these figures plug their ears with headphones and defiantly shut their eyes and mouths. These works offer a message of hope and resilience, countering the despair endemic to our modern moment.

REVIVAL is on view through July 8 at albertz benda, 8260 Marmont Ln. Los Angeles