Audrey Gair

King's Leap presents a two-part exhibition with Audrey Gair. The first part, an exhibition entitled Ode To A Very Very Close Friend, across both floors of the gallery. The second presentation is at Frieze New York in the Focus Section. This is King's Leap first time exhibiting at Frieze, and Gair's debut at the fair. Gair's work explores various subjects to imagine new frontiers in the language of abstract painting. Informed equally by craft adjacent projects and process based aesthetics, Gair stresses the act of the medium by prioritizing her moves, textures, and applications of paint.

For Audrey Gair, process is a means to aesthetic freedom, that perspective children seem to so effortlessly inhabit. Her paintings, though tethered to the symbolic code of the material world, become a site for reverie. It’s the place “where reality bends and things meld into one another, happy and mysterious.” Gair’s paintings capture the sublime through the flexibility of free-association found in containers of the everyday. The subjects of the paintings, objects where communal gatherings take place, are turned into abstracted aggregates of moves, gestures and applications of paint. Her works recall childhood, the realm of pre-language where color, shape and form collapse into kaleidoscopic experience. However, to inhabit that simpler time, Gair must betray naïveté, invoking systems to push painting forward through intellectual play. Each of her paintings is a leap of faith, hypotheses that she tests, capable of both success and failure. Innocence and rigor are exercised hand in hand.

What makes someone a very close friend, or even a very very close friend? It suggests someone intimately, but that person remains obscure. Who could that friend be? Is it a real friend? Another artist? A painter? Family, lover, or pet? Maybe the friend is a painting. Or the friend is the viewer of the painting. Built on trust, that friendship can be complicated and unsteady. At times reciprocal and others one-sided, the tenuous ground of friendship, its sense of discovery, is what keeps it moving forward.

Audrey Gair (b. 1992, Miami, FL) lives and works in New York. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Eli Kerr (Montreal, CA), Bad Water (Knoxville, TN), South Parade (London, UK), King’s Leap (New York, NY), and Sebastian Gladstone (Los Angeles, CA). Selected group exhibitions include Château Shatto (Los Angeles, CA), Iowa (New York, NY), Depa Archive (Ghent, BE), Freddy (Harris, NY), Room 3557 (Los Angeles, CA), Clearing (Casa Da Cultura, Comporta, PT), Galerie Crévecoeur (Paris, FR), Galerie Hussenot, (Paris, FR), In Lieu (Los Angeles, CA), Apt 13’s a New Museum’s Triennial, Fall River MOCA (Fall River, MA), and Gern en Regalia (New York, NY).