Louis B. James is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Scottish-born, New York-based artist Graham Durward, his first in New York since 2007.

Durward’s paintings in oil on linen render formally the intangibility and ephemerality of desire. He works primarily in three veins: portraiture, still life, and art historical devotional imagery, and treats each subject to the same interplay of abstraction and representation, obscurity and clarity. The portraits are culled from the Internet and display anonymous men who have obscured their own faces with crude Photoshop technology. The painterly violence of erasure, with oil paint mimicking digital drawing, lends a darkness to the subjects’ advertisements of desire. Durward’s still lives bear a tenuous relationship to the tradition; based on photographs taken by the artist, they depict the smoke from incense and candles, fixing in time the fluidity of the incorporeal. His sacred imagery, here the Shroud of Turin and the Sistine Chapel dissolved to abstraction, similarly engage the impossibility of the painterly depiction of immateriality.

Graham Durward studied at Edinburgh College of Art and the Whitney Independent Study program. He has had solo exhibitions at Maureen Paley, London (2009); White Columns, New York (2007); AC Project Room, NY (2001); Marianne Boesky Gallery (1997), and others. His work has been featured in group exhibitions at Luxembourg & Dayan, New York (2011-12); Vox Populi, Philadelphia (2011); the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia (2009); White Columns (2006), among others. His work was recently on view at the Saatchi Gallery, London.

Louis B. James was founded by David Fierman and RJ Supa in 2011. The gallery is located at 143b Orchard Street, New York. The gallery is open from Wednesday through Saturday from 11 to 6 and Sunday from 12-6. For more information please email [email protected] or call (212) 533 4670.