RAY OGLESBY, Recent Works Accola Griefen Gallery Inaugural Exhibition September 8 – October 15th, 2011

NEW YORK, NY, AUGUST 2011 – ACCOLA GRIEFEN GALLERY is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition – recent work by Ray Oglesby. The exhibition will be on view from September 8th – October 15, 2011, with a reception on Thursday, September 15 from 6pm to 9pm.

In his first full-scale solo exhibition, Ray Oglesby masterfully combines the line quality and scale of graffiti “writing” with other ideas and forms more proper to New York School painting and Pop art. Of his own practice Oglesby writes, “I make use of disembodied shapes and the idea of the wall as frame, which relate to the phenomena of 1980’s graffiti in New York City when, through layer upon layer, thousands of voices condensed into an almost indecipherable cacophony of color, line, form and chaos.” In simplifying and distilling this early influence, Oglesby has created a distinctive visual vocabulary that remains as energized and animated as its origins.

The exhibition includes works on canvas and large-scale sculpture-paintings that consist of cut and layered plywood. Each three-dimensional piece operates in the realm of a paper cutout, rather than retaining the physicality of sculpture. Forms are rendered to suggest a softening of the rigid material, offering the illusion of receding and projecting space. Ribbon-like lines, circles and cylinders populate the pieces, weaving an anthropomorphic and mischievous life of their own. In this way, Oglesby draws on the multiple associations of the cylinder / conduit: blood vessel, aqueduct, air passage – both base and scientific, elegant and evocative. Returning to their urban roots, the works also reference the endless underground pipelines of water, electricity, gas, steam and waste that form a city’s infrastructure and make its existence possible. With this deceivingly playful visual language the work sustains a complexity of conflicting impulses that infer both the doing and undoing of positive and negative forces.

Ray Oglesby was born in Queens, NY in 1971 and grew up in New York City and Dublin, Ireland. By the late 1980s Oglesby had accomplished numerous large-scale murals and graffiti pieces throughout New York and had established a name for himself in the urban art community (though in the tradition of the art form – an anonymous one.) Starting in 1993 Oglesby attended Bard College where he studied under Judy Pfaff and Amy Sillman. There he was co-curator for a two-part exhibition and festival titled “Raw Arts Society,” which brought together significant underground artists from various genres. Since 1998 Oglesby has lived and worked in Brooklyn NY. His work has been included in exhibits at Goliath Gallery, Fuentes Gallery, Floating Galleries and Sideshow Gallery among others.

ACCOLA GRIEFEN GALLERY is open Tuesday through Saturday from 11am to 6pm. For more information visit accolagriefen.com or contact [email protected] or 718 938 5941 or 917 613 2501.