Mike Egan

Meredith Rosen Gallery is pleased to present Lana, a solo exhibition of new work by Mike Egan.

Ten two-inch square polaroids of Lana Del Rey. Each portrait is extremely distorted, and almost unrecognizable as Ms. Del Rey. Detached from identity, these haunting, hallucinatory works began with Egan’s concert t-shirt picturing the singer. One evening, taking impromptu polaroids of himself wearing the shirt, he became fascinated with the hyperreal malleability of the image of her face. As his body moved, the shirt rose and fell, warping, twisting, and blurring the pop star dramatically. Recaptured as a painterly subject, Del Rey’s visage is transformed into many different women, each isolated and embraced by chiaroscuro, as if plucked from one of Goya’s crowd scenes. The failing of the icon changed the subject of the work, with Del Rey obscured beneath the surface as a still-intimate attachment. The work exists in opposition to the nonsense of social media, as physical artifacts of fleeting circumstance, and as a rabbit/duck illusion, simultaneously depicting and obscuring the artist himself. Matted on an antique beige background and mounted individually in walnut frames, the polaroids become sculptural objects, each one giving the impression of a window into a small, endless room.

Mike Egan (b. 1982 Great Lakes, IL) is an artist, gallerist, and musician. He graduated from the University of Texas (BA, 2004) and the School of Visual Arts (MFA, 2007). He has run the Ramiken gallery since 2009. His first solo exhibition, Urn Burial, was at Eli Ping Frances Perkins in 2017. This is Egan’s first exhibition with Meredith Rosen Gallery.