Graham Collins

Halsey McKay is thrilled to present Graham Collins’ most ambitious sewn canvas work to date. Collins’ related series in which inherited, humble materials are revived to create works that merge sculpture and painting and nod to an authorship dissolved between the original and artist’s intervention. For the exhibition sections of found artworks are carefully seamed into reconstituted canvases, which the artist arranges in poetic compositions linked to their source material. Sections of sky appear in chronological order; segments are paired into uniform patterns or colors; a painting is composed from the sides and over-flaps of its originals. Frenetic, compressed, chaotic passages run into carefully regimented, highly composed sections and then again towards baroque geometry. The pictorial mode flits between a fraught figuration and pure concrete abstraction.

Graham Collins was born in Washington, D.C. in 1980. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received his BFA 2003 from Corcoran College of Art in Washington and his MFA 2010 from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Recent exhibitions include Hundred Year Hand at C. Grimaldis, Baltimore (2017), Graham Collins at Almine Rech, Brussels (2016), Early Words, Halsey McKay Gallery (2015), The Village, Bugata & Cargnel, Paris (2015), Stadiums, The Journal, Brooklyn (2015), Clean Room at Luce Gallery in Torino, Italy (2014), Concert in the Park, at Jonathan Viner Gallery, London, UK (2014). This is Collins’ third solo exhibition with Halsey McKay Gallery.