kiaf seoul
September 2 - 6, 2022
about
Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Scott Laufer in its debut presentation at Kiaf Seoul, on view at Booth S09 from September 2 - 6, 2022. This presentation will be the first for both the artist and the gallery in Asia.
Interlacing techniques and floating historical allusions weave a thread connecting each painting in Scott Laufer’s latest body of work. Inverting tropes shared by both classical history painting and contemporary modes of mark-making, the artist urges a reconsideration of historical narratives and conventions. In Untitled, for example, the artist applies a technique virtually synonymous with 20th century art to painted Dutch imagery from four centuries earlier, resulting in the uncanny collision of content and technique.
Likewise, his Moth (A) nearly effaces the barely-there still life rendered in a shadowy blue on black ground. Silver leafing, itself a historically loaded process, becomes a means for signaling modernity and obscuring painterly genre. Further, Laufer’s two new large-scale paintings, S-KC-2 and S-KC- 375, delight in obscuring formal expectation. Their monumental size and towering format suggest narrative, while Laufer’s deliberate avoidance of just that brings the paintings squarely into the realm of abstraction. The artist’s subtly expressive brushwork swirls through passages of shimmering drapery and disembodied eyes, creating new contexts and ways of thinking through both history and contemporary painting. Uniting the body of work are four small canvases, all Untitled (Grid), on which Laufer mirrors a face and overlays it with an even field of five-pointed stars. The overtly digitized gesture harks back to both the computer and the brush, uniting the two and completing the tight narrative arc of Laufer’s most recent works.