Clémentine Bruno - Jesse Darling - Adam Gordon - Ryan Mrozowski - Stella Zhong
These artist practices all reference dominant, art historical or institutional, methods of visual representation. Through various processes of decontextualization—and in diverse media including painting, photography and video—they subvert the familiar, finding presence in void spaces and absent subjects. Their ghostly forms, obscured imagery, abstracted still lives, vacant landscapes, and fictive environments acknowledge and resist established frameworks for passive visual consumption.
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Clémentine Bruno engages with painting’s mythologized history, complicating the notion of painting as an ideological enactment of subjectivity. She uses painting as a tool to question the cultural capital of artistic labor, appropriating and displacing art historical elements to unveil and subvert its hegemonic discourse. Her unceremonious representations prompt an experience unmoored by language.
Clémentine Bruno (b. 1994, Paris) lives and works in London and received her MA in painting from the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 2019. She has had a solo exhibition at Project Native Informant, London (2020) and three-person exhibitions at Space 52, Athens (2019) and Studio 59, London (2018). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Stoppenbach & Delestre, London (2020), Project Native Informant, London (2019), Sans Titre, Paris (2018), and Slade Research Centre, London (2018), among others. Bruno is also part of an ongoing collective project, B. W. (BAMBI WOOD), through which she received the NEON Contemporary Art Exhibitions Grant in 2019. In 2021 she will be included in a two-person exhibition with Adam Gordon at Chapter NY, New York.
Jesse Darling’s multi-disciplinary practice considers how bodily subjects are initially formed and continuously reformed through sociopolitical influences. JD draws on their own experience as well as the narratives of history and counter-history. Their work merges and recontextualizes manmade objects, fictional characters, and mythical symbols to reveal their precarity.
Jesse Darling (b. 1981, Oxford, UK) lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include The Ballade of Saint Jerome as part of Art Now, Tate Britain, London (2018); Selva Oscura, Galerie Sultana, Paris (2019), Crevé, Triangle France, Marseille (2019); Support Level, Chapter NY, New York (2018); and The Great Near, Arcadia Missa, London (2016). Darling has participated in many group exhibitions including, The Same Room, Neu Gallerie, Berlin (2020); the 58th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale (2019), Transcorporealities, Museum Ludwig, DE (2019); Body Splits, SALTS, Basel (2019); Docile Bodies, VITRINE, London, UK (2018); CHA Cris Ouverts, Biennale d’art contemporain, Rennes (2018); and ‘Metarmophõseõn’, Galerie Sultana, Paris (2018).
Adam Gordon centers his multi-disciplinary practice on the framing of personal experience. Shifting between paintings, totalizing installations, constructed encounters, and video, his work trains our attention towards everyday existence.
Adam Gordon (b. 1986, Minneapolis, MN) lives and works in New York and received his MFA from Yale University in 2011. He has had solo exhibitions at Galerie ZERO, Milan, Italy, Chapter NY, New York, The Power Station, Dallas, TX, and Hunter/Whitfield, London. Gordon’s work has been included in group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Project Native Informant, London; New Gallerie, Paris; Andrew Kreps, New York; National Exemplar, New York; Boates Fine Arts, São Paulo; and Night Gallery, Los Angeles.
Ryan Mrozowski’s practice engages seriality and repetition to reveal unexpected nuance in forms derived from the natural world. He manipulates banal, easily recognizable subjects with painterly interventions that depart from conventional representational methods. His imaginative tableaus question the normalcy of our everyday reality.
Ryan Mrozowski (b. 1981, Pennsylvania) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and received his MFA in painting from Pratt Institute in 2005. He has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm; Chapter NY, New York; Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin; Simon Lee Gallery, London; Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles; Arcade, London; On Stellar Rays, New York; Art in General, Vilnius, Lithuania; Pierogi, Brooklyn; and Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at: Jack Hanley Gallery, New York; Salon 94, New York; Marianne Boesky, New York; Chapter NY, New York; Practice Gallery, Philadelphia; Ziehersmith, New York; Rhodes College Clough-Hansen Gallery, Memphis; Kansas University Art & Design Gallery, Lawrence; The Kitchen, New York; and more.
Stella Zhong’s activated objects, observed happenings, and built environments operate independently from earth’s draw. She excavates tiny interruptions embedded in the smooth infinite. With a trust in the unknown, her work is a humble resistance to logic and definition.
Stella Zhong (b. 1993, Shenzhen, China) lives and works in New Haven, CT and is currently an MFA candidate (2021) at Yale University. She has had solo exhibitions at Spring/Break Art Show, New York; Hunter College, New York; Peninsula Art Space, Brooklyn, NY; Weybosset Gallery, Providence, RI; and Guan Shan Yue Art Museum, Shenzhen, China. Her work has also been included in group shows at Essex Street Gallery, NY; ZH Projects, NY; Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn, NY; Paris School of Art, Paris, France; Herbert Read Gallery, Canterbury, UK. She will have a solo exhibition at Chapter NY, New York in Fall 2020.