Graham Durward

Michael Steinberg Fine Art, in conjunction with 33 Orchard, presents Bathers and Others, a show of paintings and works on paper by Graham Durward. Opening on Thursday, May 8th from 6 to 8 pm and running through Sunday, June 15, 2014, the exhibition focuses on two recent bodies of work.

Within the images identified as “Bathers,” the viewer encounters a group of men, always posed in identical relationship to each other. But while the formal composition of the paintings remains nearly static, a broad and evocative range of emotionality is evoked by Durward’s painterly nuance. Color and gesture, alternately intense or ghostly, combine to generate a complex variety of moods and subjective experience. The artist skillfully positions each work in a psychic borderland, charged with ambivalence and potential meaning.“Others” makes reference to works in which Graham Durward depicts single figures whose identities are disguised, distorted and disfigured. More overtly “anxious” than the “Bathers,” each of these “Others” inhabits an isolated and atomized space that is frequently menacing. Brought by vigorous and sometimes violent gesture to a point of near anonymity, they are simultaneously somewhere and nowhere. Painted incarnations of Gyorgy Lukacs’ concept of transcendental homelessness, they seek specificity and achieve abstraction.

Graham Durward was born in Aberdeen, UK and currently lives and works in New York. His most recent exhibitions include a two-person show at Heskin Contemporary in New York with artist Mary Schwab in 2014, a solo exhibition at Louis B. James, New York in 2012 and a solo exhibition at Maurren Paley, London in 2009.