recent paintings and drawings

Viewing Room | February 11 - March 11, 2023

Opening Reception: February 11, 6-8pm

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press release

Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present Recent Paintings and Drawings, an exhibition by New York-based artist Robert Feintuch. This exhibition is the artist’s first presentation with the gallery and will be installed in our Viewing Room from February 11 – March 11, 2023. We will host an opening reception on Saturday, February 11 from 6-8pm.

As one hand points, another strikes, and a third offers flimsy assistance amid disaster. Across Robert Feintuch’s recent paintings and drawings, the gestures of- and objects in- the hand become subjects, selves, and surrogates. Through learned and assumed symbolisms–pointing a finger up suggests a bestowal of wisdom, a la the toga-clad philosopher, while a gripped club portends cartoonish threat, a la The Flintstones– Feintuch uses humor and self-deprecation to prod at painting’s lofty aspirations. 

Are these the hands of some unseen, would-be hero, like a Hercules, a He-Man, or a god? Or are they self-contained and finite–attributes absent the attributed? In Pontiff, the artist gives us a simplified shoulder and a graying head hunched in front of a lecturing hand but stops short of a face. Is the hand he genuflects in front of in a painting or out the window? Resisting narrative, Feintuch’s works elevate ambiguity and anonymity, positioning the latter as a site of historical and formal freedom. Long Fire implies danger without identifying it, promising a fire bucket, but not necessarily water; Long Pontiff parodies authority while seeming to offer the trappings of a eureka moment left unspoken. 

For Feintuch, these considerations extend to materials and processes: he achieves a classicizing, fresco-like luminosity by layering thin polymer emulsion on prepared aluminum-faced honeycomb panels. Delicately feathered and lightly applied, his surfaces sit on solid, sculptural substrates. Echoes of Renaissance and Gothic figurative traditions confront the material legacies of Minimalism and Post-Minimalism, fastening ethereality to industry.  

It's this very alloy–history, gesture, material, form–that propels Feintuch’s work toward a deflation of grandiosity altogether, an understanding of artmaking (and life) as defined by missed cues and fuckups. Seductive surfaces and sleek panels deliver scrawny arms and bad posture. For all they might offer by way of convenience, our present codes and symbols often prove facile and flaccid. And surely the past wasn’t much different: even Hercules, often depicted standing naked, was exposed.

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Robert Feintuch (b. 1953, Jersey City, NJ) received his BFA from The Cooper Union in 1974, and his MFA in painting from Yale University in 1976. Since rising to prominence in the 1980s, Feintuch’s work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions. Recent group exhibitions include The Ileanna Sonnabend Collection, Ca Pesaro (2016), From Rauschenberg to Koons, Ca Pesaro., (2014) Ileana Sonnabend: An Italian Portrait, at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum, Venice (2011), Unrealism, Part 1, at Fredericks & Freiser, New York, NY, (2014), Directors’ Cut: Selections from the Maine Art Museum Trail, Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine (2015), This is America, at The UK Art Museum, Lexington, Kentucky, (2021), and The Talking Stone, Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles (2021). Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Rona Pondick and Robert Feintuch: Heads, Hands, Feet; Sleeping, Holding, Dreaming, Dying, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City and the Bates Museum of Art, Lewiston, Maine (2017-2018), and Selected Paintings 2010-2018 at Thomas Brambilla Gallery, Bergamo, Italy (2020-2021). Recent publications include Robert Feintuch in Conversation with Phong Bui, June 2014, The Brooklyn Rail, Rona Pondick and Robert Feintuch: Heads, Hands, Feet; Sleeping, Holding, Dreaming, Dying, Bates Museum of Art, (2017), The Sonnabend Collection, Saskatoon, Canada, Remai Modern by Antonio Homem (2019) and Between a Laugh and a Yelp: Robert Feintuch Interviewed by Albert Godetzky, Bomb Magazine, April 19,2021. Feintuch was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008 and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in 1996. He lives and works in New York, NY.