Opening Reception: June 20, 6-9pm
Forms discovered in the world as already-made compositions.
A world of minutiae made from minutiae.
Drifters with cartoonish qualities.
Deadpan gestures just out of reach enveloped in a very, VERY, serious approach.
Impulsiveness that stops at the surface.
Disarmingly simple, somewhat unrecognizable shapes,
Transcribed into mysterious sigils detached from their prior selves.
The creation of a new, alternative object with its own distinct reality.
A quasi psychedelic romp through abstraction as a disguise for a more objective and material origin.
Suburban, urban, pastoral nonsense.
“And what exactly is a joke?”
The suggestion of experience?
Making the idea of a painting as opposed to an actual painting?
It is more or less,
( is )
a painting.
“And what exactly is a dream?”
A reflection of how we move through the world?
Some moments and things are fleeting.
Others are consistent and routine.
Some paintings are singular, one offs.
Others employ motifs that regularly repeat themselves.
Always different, always the same.
A figure walks.
“It’s awfully considerate of me to think of you here.”
A figure walked.
In a world of manicured images.
In a textile shell.
In a container.
Through disheveled exfoliations on a bedroom floor,
Translated into optically indifferent paintings.
All the while remembering,
Everything looks better in print.
“Have you got it yet?”
Reality as a cluttered place,
Littered with us,
Requiring mindless doodles, mindfully constructed.
Notes to the future (multiple attempts)
Notes to the present (Brain in a VAT)
Notes from the past (dead ends)
Artifacts?
Props?
This show could easily be called “Works on Paper”
or
The residue of a life lived.
“Have you got it yet?”
Marking Time as a way of confronting the future.
A vestige of an age before a more ephemeral, digital landscape took over.
A list of artists (corrected)…
What is that thing even called?
A satirization of a social media age characterized by shameless self-promotion and self-help gurus?
The subject matter is so mundane it becomes absurd.
Part self-flagellation,
Part mirror,
I,I,I,I…
…transpose the things on the verge of being thrown in the trash, the washing machine or onto the ground.
The byproducts of living,
The remnants we don’t want to look at or think about beyond their expiration but shed prolifically and effortlessly.
In the end,
I make work from what’s lying around.
“Have you got it yet?”
Jeremy DePrez (b. 1983 Portland, Maine) is a visual artist known for paintings that transform the residue of everyday life into uncanny subversions of reality. For more than a decade DePrez has mined the evasive, inanimate forms that populate his life and archived them through the language of painting. The end product invites us to question the relationships between art, throwaway culture, and the circumstantial debris that populate our lives.
Selected solo exhibitions include GLYPHS, Best Western, Santa Fe (2023), Tent Posts, SUNNY, New York (2021), Boy Meets World, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin (2017), Mind Fold, Texas Gallery, Houston (2017), Tenet, Zach Feuer Gallery, New York (2014). Selected Group Exhibitions include Hypervision, Magenta Plains, New York (2023), Outside The Lines, Texas Gallery, Houston (2023), Beyond The Frame, Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels (2022) Shapeshifters, Luhring Augustine, New York (2016), Das Bild Hangt Shief, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin (2016) and The Shaped Canvas Revisited, Luxemborg & Dayan, New York (2014). He was an artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in 2015. DePrez lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.