Cynthia Broan Gallery is delighted to announce Don’t Argue, an exhibition of new paintings by British artist Daniel Sturgis, as well as a project room installation of sculpture, painting and collage by New York University MFA candidate Ernesto Burgos and a video by Champneys Taylor.

Following his recent residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, Daniel Sturgis will exhibit a new series of works which use the perceived impasse in modernist abstract painting as a springboard to enter an area where hybridity is not negative or disruptive, but rather a source of wit, beauty and even harmony. These new works, while playfully evoking memories of Modernist abstraction, transgress such a reading by manipulating inherited ways of seeing and understanding combinations of shapes, color and scale. At first glance they appear abstract, quiet and meditative because of their clear tonal shapes and compositions. Upon closer inspection, the shapes anthropomorphize into figurative elements reminiscent of buildings, people, wider vistas and landscapes that, once noticed, oscillate equivocally with the purely abstract mode of perceiving the work. In his essay for the exhibition, writer Roy Voss finds endless possible ways of reading the shapes and composition of a featured work, concluding that, “most of all the painting looks like a painting by Daniel Sturgis. It is ambrosial, uplifting, funny, awkward, familiar and peculiar.”

Ernesto Burgos will exhibit a series of two-and three-dimensional works that function as collage, using the idea and process of selection and recombination of everyday materials as a metaphor for reanalyzing the systems that surround us. Burgos sees his manipulation of material as a political gesture, putting systems under question and expanding the possibility of their functions. Structures are tangentialized, crystallized, attacked, blackened and melting down. The materials and forms innately have a reference to their past but have been abstracted enough to function as raw building blocks for reconstruction of the spaces they occupy.

Champ Taylor’s video Lens Cap Click (K.N.) was created as an homage to the painter Kenneth Noland, using lo-tech film techniques to activate the optical and naturalistic experience of Noland’s ring paintings, the circle pulsating in a field of muted, unsaturated color. The video was created for Color School: Remix, a juried show of video, film and audio work related to Washington Color School paintings, exhibited at the Corcoran Museum earlier this year. This is Taylor’s third video exhibition at the gallery.

Daniel Sturgis (b. 1966) lives and works in London. His work has been shown widely with solo exhibitions in London, Athens, Stuttgart, Amsterdam, New York and Rome. His paintings have been included in notable survey shows in public institutions such as Perfidy: Surviving Modernism (Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge 2000); Complimentary Studies: Recent Abstract Painting (Harris Museum, Preston 2001); Painting as a Foreign Language (Sao Paolo Biennale 2002). His work is included in major public and private collections including such as the UK Government Art Collection, Saatchi Collection, Progressive Collection and the Daimler Chrysler Collection. This is his second solo show with the gallery. A publication with an essay by Roy Voss is available.

Ernesto Burgos (b. 1979) received his BFA from the California College of Arts (CCA) in San Francisco in 2004 and is currently living and studying in New York. He has shown in Miami, San Francisco and New York, including the exhibition Look Away at the gallery this past summer. He has upcoming shows at Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco and Locust Projects, Miami.