REALLY. by Miles McEnery Gallery

Curated by Inka Essenhigh & Ryan McGinness

tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com 520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

511 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

BO BARTLETT DELIA BROWN WILL COTTON INKA ESSENHIGH CHIE FUEKI BRAD KAHLHAMER 3

KURT KAUPER JOSHUA MARSH RYAN McGINNESS STEVE MUMFORD JOHN SONSINI ALISON ELIZABETH TAYLOR GAVIN WILSON

REALLY. By Kurt McVey It can be about the art. No. Really. There is a space where figuration is not so tethered to didactic political representation alone; where the imagination can run wild; where deeply embedded archetypes and symbols can unfurl in a vast Pop-Jungian hyper-loop; a space where imagery defies easy categorization. To divorce oneself as a human and artist from the unpredictable and at times frightening tumult of the ongoing calendar year known as 2020, is nearly impossible. A global pandemic compounded by racial upheaval spurred on by acts of egregious state violence play out in a surreal landscape perhaps too strange for fiction. Anger, fear, frustration, confusion, all run through with a mainline of incredulity. So why not, Really?! To punctuate or not to punctuate, was just one of many questions contemplated by the American artists and twenty-year friends, Inka Essenhigh and Ryan McGinness, while discussing a title for the Fall (October 15 - November 14), 2020, group exhibition they were charged with co-curating, in tandem, quite remarkably, with their own respective solo shows at Miles McEnery Gallery in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. The latter won out. Really. “We didn’t want that obvious, pop culture reference,” begins McGinness via a multi-party Zoom call, that swiftly ubiquitous, virtual quarantine communication tool, and within the frame his own Art World Hollywood Square portal. “Though for me, it’s a question.” “Are you kidding me? Are you serious? No way!” adds a fierce and fun Essenhigh from her own digital square, nevertheless leaning on a particular late night host’s incredulous but starched, past-hipster inflection of the word. “Really!?!”

“Sounds like made up realities,” offers the American painter and art world super-conductor, Will Cotton, quite breezily from his own thumbnail, replete with mischievous cat-inlap. “When I heard it, I thought, ‘Oh, even more!’ You know, hyper-realized,” says Chie Fueki, the Japanese-American painter who, like Mr. Cotton, was one of eleven artists carefully selected by the curators, who will also each be showing a unique artwork in Really.

“This whole thing started as a story between Ryan and I,” says Essenhigh. “How are we going to talk about our work? What do we have in common? What’s the context in which we came up?” In many ways, Really. could be viewed as a contemporary generational survey of late ‘90s painting and drawing neo-pioneers; matriculating Gen X kids swimming past the murky entrails of staid, 20th century abstraction to rediscover figuration at the “Pop Surrealist” dawn of the new millennium. “Our generation is a generation that grew up in the art world,” Essenhigh continues. “There were things we could and couldn’t do. We wanted to make paintings we were forbidden to make, like the pretty sunset.” But who says it needs to be a sunset on Earth? These are creatives who can trace the surreal life supremacy of the Donald, Kanye and the Kardashians back to Reality Bites (1994), MTV’s The Real World and perhaps most pertinent to the contemporary moment, the OJ Simpson trial’s verdict, quite possibly the last “we interrupt your regularly scheduled programming” public decree since the 2016 presidential election to so egregiously bifurcate the American populace into opposing camps of hyper-concentrated, multi-flavored Really? “It’s not about the art world,” Essenhigh says. “Everyone here is deeply invested in their own world. Everything in this show is hand made. It’s not about cribbing somebody else’s work. It’s not about deskilling. It’s not post-modern.” Essenhigh and McGinness first met via their shared connection to Deitch Projects in

New York, where they both had solo exhibitions (in 1999 and 2002 respectively). Their friendship, including many others in Really., calcified further as Will Cotton began hosting his transformative art salons, where carefully curated artists were invited to draw from life. “Will’s class was an inspiration to me in particular because I had started to work figuratively,” says Fueki, who perhaps, not since Cotton’s class, is now deeply reconnecting with the essential nature of seeing. “I knew a way into that could be drawing from life.” “The reason I started doing it [the salon] was because I had not painted or drawn a figure since art school” Cotton explains. “I had these ideas for paintings that had figures in them, so I thought I would brush up. I knew that unless I did it as a regular thing, I might fall off. The group thing made me do it.” The criteria for Really. would stand as an algorithmic funnel for a specific school of painters, all master materialists responsible for their own artistic language, symbology, their own worlds, and the strictly personal creation of the art object itself. “We put the spirit in the matter!” exclaims Essenhigh, at once playful and defiant. “Nobody else could make this work.” “One of the qualities of art that makes it so magical is the disconnect between intention and interpretation,” adds McGinness. “It’s that gap where the magic really happens; where the poetry is. It’s what separates art from all the other ways we can contribute to culture.”

Kurt McVey began his journalism career as a contributor to Interview Magazine where he covered emerging and established names in the art, music, fashion and entertainment worlds. He has since contributed to The New York Times, T Magazine, Vanity Fair, Forbes, PAPER Magazine, ArtNet, Architectural Digest, and Whitehot Magazine.

BO BARTLETT Freedom, 2019 Oil on linen 82 x 100 inches 208.3 x 254 cm

DELIA BROWN Blonde Mom, 2020 Oil on linen 24 x 18 inches 61 x 45.7 cm

WILL COTTON The Taming of the Cowboy, 2020 Oil on linen 52 x 78 inches 132.1 x 198.1 cm

INKA ESSENHIGH Snowflake (Pink), 2009 Oil on canvas 64 x 72 inches 162.6 x 182.9 cm

CHIE FUEKI High Fidelity, 2017 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2020

Acrylic, ink and color pencil on mulberry paper on wood 60 x 36 inches 152.4 x 91.4 cm

BRAD KAHLHAMER Indian Swap, 2020 Oil on canvas 75 3/4 x 60 inches 192.4 x 152.4 cm

KURT KAUPER Woman #4, 2017 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2020 Oil on dibond 88 x 58 inches 223.5 x 147.3 cm

JOSHUA MARSH Basket, 2020 Graphite on paper 13 x 8 inches 33 x 20.3 cm

RYAN McGINNESS Mother and Child (Ball Chair) A, 2020 Acrylic on linen 72 x 60 inches 182.9 x 152.4 cm

STEVE MUMFORD Land Rover, 1999 Oil on canvas 56 x 84 inches 142.2 x 213.4 cm

JOHN SONSINI Guillermo, 2020 Oil on canvas 45 x 36 inches 114.3 x 91.4 cm

ALISON ELIZABETH TAYLOR Sketch for a Still Life, 2020 Marquetry hybrid 50 x 63 inches 127 x 160 cm

GAVIN WILSON Naked Sage: Dandelion Holder, 2014 Pencil on paper 103 x 59 inches 261.6 x 149.9 cm

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

REALLY.

SURREAL REAL WORKS BY OUR FRIENDS Curated by Inka Essenhigh & Ryan McGinness 15 October – 14 November 2020 Miles McEnery Gallery 511 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com

Publication © 2020 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2020 Kurt McVey Director of Publications Anastasija Jevtovic, New York, NY Photography by Christopher Burke Studio, New York, NY Farzad Owrang, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-949327-35-9 Cover: The Taming of the Cowboy, (detail), 2020