John Connelly Presents is pleased to announce the exhibition Horses, a new series of drawings by California artist Frank Selby, in the JCP Tunnel Room. Drawn from press photography, film stills, and mental images, Selby’s work explores the indexical mark as a sign of absence and failure. The artist’s detailed, horrific renderings of land and cityscapes, strewn with dead bodies, refer to past conflicts yet evade real representation, and even the trauma of conflict seems to exist outside of the picture space. These inferred subjects have failed to survive and the artist’s images fail to be accurate – his larger works are created and assembled in grids that do not line up perfectly – a suggestion that ours is a complicated relationship with the ways that conflict and violence are represented. In addition to Selby’s beautiful and sublimely flawed draftsmanship, these works essentially rest upon his idea of “negative” values, those of absence, failure, mistake, absurdity and futility.

Selby has had exhibitions in Los Angeles, the Netherlands and London. Selected exhibitions include: Victoria Miro Gallery, London, 2004; Transition Gallery, London, 2003; Gallery 825, L.A., 2000; and ASA Gallery, Albuquerque, Netherlands, 2000. He is represented by Museum 52 in London where he will have a solo exhibition in 2008.