Michael Dean, Four Fuck Sakes (Installation View), via Andrew Kreps
Michael Dean’s idiosyncratic work draws on language in its wildest sense. Often based on his own writing, Dean broadens what we understand to be the written word into a manifestation of semiotics and typographical abstractions—such as emoticons and logos that morph into three dimensional glyphs. Regularly deploying accessible materials, Dean draws out new language with which the forms themselves are at once a personal vernacular, and a physical configuration. The transitional movement from word-to-image-to-being becomes an amalgamation of symmetrical and physical intimacy.
Michael Dean, Four Fuck Sakes (Installation View), via Andrew Kreps
This mode of practice takes center stage this month at Andrew Kreps in New York, presenting a series of new works that continue the artist’s interpretations of graphical and semiotic juxtapositions. Often using concrete and rebar, Dean’s materials bring with them their own associations with an urban landscape, and the haphazard accumulation of visual information that occurs with them. The resulting sculptures are also intrinsically tied to the human body, both through the imprinted marks of his hands, and their intimate scale, which is often analogous to Dean’s own body as he grapples with material in the studio. Brought together, Dean looks towards the countless ways, both physical and mental, through which we experience language, as well as the endless potential for revision and reinterpretation.
Michael Dean, Four Fuck Sakes (Installation View), via Andrew Kreps
Crumpled bottles dot the floor in one corner, countered by a strange, leaning figure doted with gestural graphics. On the other side, one is confronted with the logo of the Playboy bunny. In another, a large musical note is echoed in sculpture and canvas. Each time executed in the same loping, loose hand that underscore’s Dean’s work in the gestural confusion of often tightly-rendered images and graphics. Elsewhere, the artist renders the same large-scale bunny logo in the same mode, a more tightly-executed, cleanly rendered image that offers a a striking counterpoint.
The artist’s work is on view through November 4th.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Michael Dean: Four Fuck Sakes [Exhibition Site]
