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ARTCAT



Three: Damien Flood / Joy Garnett / Andrew Seto

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Theodore:Art
53 Mercer Street, 212-966-4324
Soho
May 14 - June 19, 2011
Reception: Saturday, May 14, 6 - 8 PM
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Stephanie Theodore is pleased to present Three: Damien Flood / Joy Garnett / Andrew Seto. A brochure will accompany this show.

This exhibition brings together three artists whose work inhabits a delicate grey area between factual imagery, subjective recall, and painterly interaction. We all see what we want to in a work of art, whether it is violence, landscape, still life, or abstraction. The visceral materiality of paint can convey a multitude of developing possibilities whilst avoiding specific depiction. It is relatively simple for a work of art to have definitive intentionality. It is quite another thing to be ambiguous without ambivalence.

Damien Flood’s work is situated between fact and fiction. The paintings are modern landscapes that reference the history of painting with an underlying fantastical element. A fleeting familiarity can be found in the work that is soon replaced by an ambiguous questioning.

Joy Garnett utilises painting to investigate the modern experience of global events as mediated and choreographed by images from news media and social networks. Walter Benjamin’s prediction that alienated man would be dazzled by the spectacle of destruction seems prescient in light of Garnett’s lushly painted scenes of disaster and chaos.

Andrew Seto makes paintings of paradox, positing immediate sensory experience as viscerally urgent questions. Texture and colour of a rich, sensual nature approach the threshold of order within an indeterminacy of form. Not so much answers as much as resolution, an equilibrium of sorts, is found.

Damien graduated from the MA in Fine Art in NCAD in 2008. He has been selected for the John Moores Contemporary Painting Prize in 2008 and 2010. In 2008 he was also selected for the Saatchi Space in London during Frieze ‘08. He has been in numerous other group exhibitions including Futures 10 at RHA, Dublin; ‘Unbuiling’ Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray; Five Hundred Dollars Gallery, London and previous group exhibitions in Green On Red Gallery, Dublin. Damien is represented by Green On Red Gallery and had his first solo exhibition with them in January 2010.

Joy Garnett’s work is concurrently on view in the exhibition With Food in Mind, curated by Nicole Caruth at The Center For Book Arts, NY, and in Beyond the Horizon, an exhibition of landscape painting and drawing curated by Amy Lipton, opening in June at the Deutsche Bank Gallery, 60 Wall Street, NY. Notable past exhibitions include That Was Then…This Is Now, MoMA P.S.1 and Image War: Contested Images of Political Conflict, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art. Garnett is a recipient of a grant from Anonymous Was a Woman, and serves as Arts Editor for the scholarly journal Cultural Politics. She lives in New York and is represented by Winkleman Gallery, NY.

Andrew Seto studied in London at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design and the Slade School of Fine Art. At the Slade he won the Sir William Coldstream Prize and a scholarship to the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. He recently exhibited new paintings in a solo show at London Metropolitan University, and was selected as a finalist for the 2010 Jerwood Drawing Prize. Previous juried exhibitions include: the Whitechapel Gallery Open, the Bayer Art Prize, and ‘30 Years of Drawing’ at the New York Studio School. He also serves as a trustee director of the artist residency program The Florence Trust and sits on the advisory board of the cultural-political journal, ‘Mute’. Andrew lives and works in London.

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