David Mramor

Louis B. James is pleased to present Venus, the first solo show by New York based painter David Mramor. Mramor’s work was previously included in a two-artist show at the gallery in 2012. His process is photo-based and culminates in a burst of performative, expressive mark making. Images of female stars and anonymous men, “John Doe’s,” are altered via Photoshop and printed onto canvas or fabric. These images serve as a ground to Mramor’s abstract, aggressive swaths of various types of acrylic paint, from thickly applied gel medium to thin as air spray paint. The gestural strokes maintain a verbal quality, reacting to a perceived relationship, situation or conflict.

For this show, Mramor has pared down his source imagery to two photographs of the artist’s mother, one lying on a bed and the other in three-fourths profile, a bust in two dimensions. The images recall various art historical precedents, from Manet’s Olympia to the “rampant gisante” of Picasso’s Demoiselles D’Avignon to Mantegna’s Lamentation of the Dead Christ. The portrait view mimes both beauty pageant headshots and Greek sculpture. Mramor’s diverse vocabulary of mark-making obscures and idolizes these figures, investing in them a psychological charge while simultaneously dissolving them, firmly relegating these images to ground, rather than figure.

Venus serves not so much as a collection of individual works but rather a large installation of paintings flipped, manipulated, erased and repeated. Hanging on its side, over carpet or all in a row there is a larger purpose present, one which serves not only the subject but allows the viewer permission to take a different view of a ubiquitous image.

David Mramor (b. 1984, Cleveland, OH, lives and works in New York) received an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2008. He has shown his work at the Whitney Museum (2012); Louis B. James (2012, 2013); Gavlak Gallery, Palm Beach (2013); Leila Heller Gallery, NY (2014); Aperto Gallery, St. Petersburg, Russia (2012); among others. In 2012 his work was shown at the Whitney Museum His work has been reviewed in The New Yorker, and other publications. Mramor also has an extensive performance practice under the guise of Enid Ellen, a post-gender feminist singer-songwriter with regular shows at Joe’s Pub, Piano’s, and other NY institutions.