Ion Birch

Horton Gallery is pleased to present Holy Man, its first solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Ion Birch.

The figures populating Holy Man, Ion Birch’s new series of graphite drawings, are not porn stars or dream girls. They are plucked from everyday life for masturbatory reveries. Like happy hedonists in amateur porn forums, their palpable delight at exposing their desires and flaunting their sexualities is as touching as it is arousing. The sexual scenarios that Birch depicts range from a good night at a swingers’ party to impossible fantasy-scenes pulsating between ecstasy and fever-dream. Carnal but cerebral, the art combines the gleeful humor of Gerard Damiano’s dirty movies with Henry Miller’s gritty social critique. Sex, in Birch’s work, bursts beyond social and logical constraints.

While Birch’s earlier work was set primarily in suburban basements where librarians morphed into libertines, his new drawings are more overtly bohemian. The luscious beatnik goddesses could be taken from suburbanites’ fantasies of artists and their muses. But influenced by Birch’s own childhood in Trinidad and Tobago, these images actually allude to cultural clashes and histories of erotic exoticism. Birch’s work engages sex’s potential to transcend romantic and pornographic associations, to become a sacred, consciousness-expanding, endeavor. His art is a return to a subculture of sexual awareness that blossomed in the nineteen-seventies but has been pushed to the fringes by mainstream pop-culture and pornography. Female desire impels these drawings, where voracious femme fatales engulf disembodied penises and torment weaker males. Freed from constraints of morality and cultural taboos, the figures flex their bodies and imaginations - excessive, extreme, exuberant and seductive.

Ion Birch (b.1971 New York, NY) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. His drawings have been featured in the following important surveys: Contemporary Erotic Drawing, Diverseworks, Houston, TX; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (publication); Reconfiguring the Body in American Art, National Academy of Art, New York, NY; and Sex Drive, Haverford College, Haverford, PA & Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA. The artist made his New York gallery solo debut in 2001 with Bronwyn Keenan Gallery, New York, NY; followed by a 2003 solo exhibition at Bellwether Gallery, New York, NY entitled The Young Penis. His artwork has been discussed in The New York Times, The Village Voice, Flaunt, Tank Magazine and the French publication Les Inrockuptibles; among others.