Is This Real

September 8 - October 27, 2018
Opening Reception: September 8, 6 - 9 PM

press release

Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present Is This Real, its second solo exhibition of paintings by Eleanor Swordy.

Each of the nine new paintings is a distinct dynamic flatland, where open-ended allegorical content frees the figure to coexist between narrative and formal dimensions with unironic levity. A symphony of ideas and visual languages seem to swim, yet are frozen. From disorientation of space and perspective, to variations in representational styles–this stillness affirms a deliberateness that informs each element of the works. The painting is not going anywhere, but your eye will dance to new rhythms.

That Was Then offers a clue to this intention. A stacked landscape containing houses and hillsides rises above and beneath an outstretched figure, whose hands are active in creating this tiled universe. A second figure, seated at a table amid a warm light, turns an indeterminate gaze out toward the viewer. Tableaux are rendered from imagination rather than experienced reality, and a delicate balance is enacted between the free-flowing and the delineated.

In For You, a figure sits opposite a mirror and experiments, perhaps in practice or preparation. Reflection prompts pause. An assemblage of painted elements–rough then smooth, translucent then opaque, deadpan then winking–leap from the surface and scramble technique and content. Activities that involve various forms of materialization embedded in these paintings ask more questions than they answer, unearthing great potential in plurality–rather than concealing it.  

This Is Now ignites this hope. Illuminated forms gather around a glowing aqua pool, ripe with suspended signs of life. Temporality is at play between discrete planes, as perceived time and space is simultaneously compressed and expanded. In these works, the composite of fractured moments magnifies disruption and difference, but also completes the scene. When was then? When is now? What is real? This painting? It is real.

Eleanor Swordy (b. 1987, Paris, France) received her BFA from The Cooper Union. Her work has been the subject of a solo exhibitions at Moskowitz Bayse and Full Haus in Los Angeles, and has been included in group presentations at Moskowitz Bayse, TYS Gallery in Copenhagen, and The Hand, The Old School House, ABC No Rio, Robert Goff Gallery, and Envoy Gallery in New York. Her works were featured in both the 2012 and 2010 Brucennial exhibitions, organized by the Bruce High Quality Foundation. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

 
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