Zach Bruder, Attic (2023), via Magenta Plains
This fall in New York, artist Zac Bruder presnts a series of new works at Magenta Plains that continue his ephemeral explorations the canvas and its subjects. Presenting a string of colorful, yet subdued canvases throughout the gallery space, Bruder orchestrates a series of meditations on material landscapes, painterly modes, and conceptual exercises.
Zach Bruder, Clear Arrears (Installation View), via Magenta Plains
The works on view here present a series of studies and spatial explorations, with a number of recurring motifs and graphics running through. There’s studied exercises in linear perspective like Attic, balanced by the surreal arrangement of teacups and teapots Customary, executed in a far more roughshod and animated hand. The works present graphic and gesture as innately tied together, as if the approach towards the materials of daily life from the static landscapes of the world around us render the works in a more loose and ready-to-use mode. There’s also works like Leap, presenting a rabbit leaping over a fence in a manner that conjures nursery rhyme books and children’s texts.
Zach Bruder, Customary (2023), via Magenta Plains
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Zach Bruder, Clear Arrears (Installation View), via Magenta Plains
Throughout, Bruder seems to present each work as a study not of his chosen forms and figures, but rather as the modes of the art historical that render them visible. Customary, as much as it functions as a surreal still-life, equally stands in as a meditation on the still-life itself. Similarly, Leap pulls from the language of printed media, children’s novels and commercial image-making in conjunction with the image itself. It’s a mode that makes works like Attic all the more intriguing, as if it’s particular interrogation of both classical modes of image-making and the modern scene mark Bruder’s negotiation of modernity and history together. Rendering these modes and styles, images and forms in equal referential states, Bruder’s work becomes an archive of the subjective, a fascinating walk through the artist’s own ways of seeing.
The show closes October 22nd.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Zach Bruder: Clear Arrears [Exhibition Site]
