Casey Kaplan is pleased to announce a new and important divergence from the gallery’s usual program. On October 18th the gallery will open three simultaneous solo exhibitions by the artists: Sarah Dornner, Garth Weiser, and Davis Rhodes. These exhibitions demonstrate the gallery’s desire to highlight three young artists living and working in New York City who have all recently graduated from local art schools.

GARTH WEISER GALLERY II

Casey Kaplan is pleased to announce the second solo exhibition in New York of artist, Garth Weiser. In a practice that hovers between the disparate formal languages of abstraction, minimalism and figuration, Weiser’s paintings are at once figures in space and flat abstractions. This paradox interrupts the logic that painting is a fixed image. Weiser’s new series will present five of his latest large-scale oil and acrylic paintings in Gallery II.

Until recently, Weiser used maquettes as the source for his paintings. He now draws on his memory of these three-Dimensional forms to create small, quick sketches and collages. These studies cross-reference images central to his iconography, including artworks and design objects from the 1980s and 1990s. Expanding on these illusions and recycled visual cues, the under drawings on canvas act as skeletons to the tape, acrylic, oil and enamel that follow.

Weiser’s paintings employ a mélange of color wheels, gradations and value scales using expressive techniques to create luscious surfaces of contrasting colors and finishes. Uniform circles fluctuate between breasts, eyes, and cavities in geometric compositions that evoke colossal heads and torsos. The undulation of palette and surface treatment combines textural, ceramic qualities with faceted illusions of space. All entitled, Nude (#1, 2, 3…) the paintings use this collective language to inform one another.

In a sequential array, the five nudes stage an ephemeral interplay of both subject and context. Through pattern, line, shape, and color, Weiser’s rich textured, platonic paintings re-invent the picture plane with a new space.

Garth Weiser received a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2005 and has had previous successful solo exhibitions at Guild & Greyshkul, New York and Kavi Gupta gallery, Chicago. In 2007 he participated in “Blackberrying,” at Christina Wilson, Copenhagen and “Destroy Athens,” The Athens Biennial, Greece. Other group exhibitions include, “Greater New York,” at PS1 MOMA, New York and “Hunch and Flail,” curated by Amy Silman at Artists Space, New York.