Simultaneously winsome and melancholic, Bryan’s paintings allude to Classical themes of portraiture and still lives, but bring his compositions into the present by using recurring motifs of bicycles, vinyl records and other quotidian details. Often incorporating the artist himself into his pictures, his paintings share a distinct, casual style with a flat surface and subdued palette. Bryan’s most recent work offers a perversely classical set of themes: the nude artists’ model and the still life. Here nudes posing with daggers and drapery that evoke an art class milieu vie with groupings of ceramics painted not from life but from the imagination. Topped off with a small self-portrait of the artist hunched over a tiny canvas, furiously at work, this exhibition offers an idiosyncratic and personal portrayal of traditional art-making.

Edgar Bryan was born 1970 in Birmingham, Alabama and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2001. He has had recent solo shows at Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Galleria Il Capricorno, Venice, and c/o Atle Gerhardsen, Berlin. He has participated in group shows at White Columns, New York, the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London. His paintings are in the collection of the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, MOCA, Los Angeles, and the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria.