Peter McRury

Peter McRury, At a Familiar Distance Nazarian / Curcio is pleased to present At a Familiar Distance, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Peter McRury, marking his debut with the gallery and his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Bringing together seven paintings, the exhibition draws on the familiar genres of portraiture, still life, and landscape, situating everyday subjects between recognition and abstraction.

Fruit on a table, swans in a pond, and a lamb in a dusky landscape appear alongside closely cropped portraits. McRury maintains a digital archive of appropriated images sourced online, intuitively collecting those that strike him for their emotional tone. As he develops an exhibition, he groups images that share a particular sensibility, using them as starting points for paintings in which color, tonal shifts, and softened edges shape how each subject comes into focus.

His subjects take the form of archetypes, reduced to the qualities that make them recognizable while withholding the details that might locate them in a particular setting or narrative. Viewed individually, each painting presents a singular subject, often tightly cropped. Together, however, the works suggest the contours of a world that feels familiar yet subtly askew, charged with the uncanny logic of a dream. The objects and scenes seem known to us, but dissolve the closer we look, revealing how much our sense of recognition depends on memory, association, and projection.

McRury builds his paintings with thin, transparent layers of airbrushed acrylic on linen. From a distance, the images appear with clarity; up close, their forms seem to dissolve into the weave of the fabric. This shifting focus recalls the quality of a mental image: convincing as an impression, yet difficult to hold under scrutiny. Recognition becomes an act of interpretation, shaped by the memories and associations each viewer brings.

Peter McRury (b. 1992, Toronto) is a Canadian artist based in Los Angeles. His recent exhibitions include Surface Tension (2026), a two-person exhibition with Rosie Clements at McLennon Pen Co., Austin, and Neapolitan Sixth (2026) at Regard Paris. He has also exhibited at Weserhalle, Berlin. His work has appeared in Architectural Digest, Galerie, Glasstire, the Austin Chronicle, Booooooom, and Overstandard. His commissions include projects for New Balance’s Fall/Winter 2024 Paris Fashion Week showroom and Ggiata Delicatessen.