envoy enterprises is pleased to announce Ecstatic Skin, Winston Chmielinski’s first solo exhibition in New York. Chmielinski’s paintings indiscriminately engage figuration and abstraction by using color and form to create emotionally charged re-imaginings of the familiar. This exhibition presents the artist’s continued investigations of the body as well as its surrogate forms in nature, with a focus on plants and lighted expanses.

The process behind these new paintings lives in a space between pure intention and accident. One method Chmielinski used in creating these new works was to sequentially paint a series of figurative and abstract paintings during one studio session. This fast-paced and near-seamless movement of brushstrokes across consecutive canvases created convergent forms that resulted in paintings that appear to grow into one another. Such effects can be seen in The Canopy is Falling and Pause whose shared watery surfaces hint at the possibility of being from the same place but from different scenes.

Chmielinski employs paint as a means to distort static images and refers to the lexicon of the everyday to reveal what paint can do and how it can enliven the seemingly banal. Thin veils of paint allow the gesso from the canvas to shine through creating lines, colors, and saturation that have been altered from their original states and transformed into captivating otherworldly motifs.

Winston Chmielinski (b. 1988 – Boston, MA) studied philosophy and creative writing at New York University’s Gallatin School Of Individualized Study, modern and contemporary Chinese literature at Peking University, and French literature and contemporary art at L’Institut Catholique in Paris. He has participated in several special commissions and projects including BOFFO Building Fashion, New York, NY (2011); MOVE! at MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2010); and Vaginal Davis is Speaking From the Diaphragm at PS 122, New York, NY (2010). He has been included in the following group exhibitions: Summer Affair at fordPROJECT, New York, NY (2011); I Am Solitary at Gift Gallery, London, UK (2011); and Tools for Thought: Rebuild Haiti at Sotheby’s, New York, NY (2010). In the summer of 2012 he was a fellow at the La Pan Residency in Barcelona, Spain.