Gerasimos Floratos

Mitchell-Innes & Nash is pleased to present X-ing, an exhibition of new work by Gerasimos Floratos (b. 1986, New York) that explores the notion of the individual within a collective experience. X-ing features approximately 10 new paintings in Floratos’s expansive gestural style, which draws inspiration from diverse subjects ranging from the act of drawing, psychogeography, the phenomenon of synesthesia and art history.

A lifelong New Yorker, living and working in Times Square, Floratos uses vignettes from his daily life to engage with the enduring questions of painting: the interplay between representation and abstraction, and the dynamic relationship between figure and ground. This blurring of elements moves figures toward the realm of abstraction, occupying a middle zone between the two and evoking a complex psycho-dynamic experience.

Works on view in X-ing feature a clashing of elements on the canvas, mirroring the discordance and disruption of the city. Symbols such as taxi cabs, subway maps, hand gestures and other signifiers of city life are layered on the canvas, often blended or obscured, but then slowly reveal themselves as newly synthesized abstract forms.

Often using his hands or sometimes a broom, stick, or paint straight from the tube, the sense of immediacy and performativity of the process belies the complexity of the multi-layered compositions. Cartoonish, doe-eyed characters, often in headphones and baseball caps, intersect and struggle to emerge from the clashing forms which surround and threaten to envelop them.

Gerasimos Floratos (b. 1986, New York) lives and works between New York and Kefalonia, Greece. Recent solo exhibitions include Hymn at Château de Boisgeloup, Gisors (2022); Maps at Almine Rech, Paris (2022); Bismuth at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York (2020); There’s a sidewalk inside this gut at Tanya Leighton, Berlin (2019); Slangwich Motel at Schloss, Oslo (2018); 1977 at Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens (2018); Soft Bone Journey at Armada, Milan (2017);

Big Town at Pilar Corrias Gallery, London (2016) and White Columns, New York (2016), where the artist had his first solo New York exhibition.