This is the first major New York exhibition of paintings by the British artist Daniel Sturgis. In his latest work Sturgis has developed a series of startling and original paintings which continue his exploration into the possibilities and legacy of abstraction.

Through different permutations of a repertoire of stencilled shapes and colors, the artist performs the task of painting via a combination of seeming repetition and intuition. Haunted by a sense of utopia inherited from the days of modernism, Sturgis’ paintings escape any specific pictorial canon by being inclusive to a number of very different sources. Although essentially abstract, these elegant and eccentric compositions bring together eclectic references from both the contemporary and art historical worlds.

It is a test of their success that while the paintings manage to evoke readings and associations, they never surrender the sum of their parts; they veer off at tangents, and are unsettling as they ask questions about the very nature of painting, of abstraction and the real.

Daniel Sturgis (b.1966) lives and works in London.