Michael Reafsnyder
MORE, Painting and Sculpture 2002-2005
Las Vegas Art Museum
October 1 - December 31, 2005
The Las Vegas Art Museum (LVAM) presents MORE: Michael Reafsnyder, Painting and Sculpture 2002-2005. This comprehensive survey of the works created by California artist Michael Reafsnyder since 2002 constitutes the first installment of LVAM’s newly created Contemporaries Series, an ongoing series of exhibitions dedicated to presenting works by emerging and internationally recognized contemporary artists. This is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition, and his Las Vegas debut.
Michael Reafsnyder is known for brilliantly colored abstract paintings executed in oils or acrylics, in an exuberant painterly style. The artist painted in oils from 1996 through 2004. These works generally feature frenetic, densely filled compositions executed with a combination of thick brush strokes and skeins of paint squeezed directly from the tube, with some passages flattened with a squeegee. They usually include primitive-style representations of “smiley face” extraterrestrial creatures, and occasionally scribbled words, which are formed by skeins of paint or scratched into the painted surface.
The acrylic paintings, which the artist began making in 2004, retain the figurative elements and rich color of earlier works, but have greater clarity of form. For the most part, the skeins extruded from tubes are replaced with broad, multicolor brush strokes that create fluid movement in the compositions. Recently, Michael Reafsnyder created a small number of works produced by casting the deeply articulated surface of a painting in bronze. After the casting, the painting is discarded. The More exhibition includes most of these relief sculptures. It also features several free-standing sculptures and relief sculptures in glazed clay, which represent a new addition to the artist’s repertoire, and which have never before been exhibited. Michael Reafsnyder lives in Orange, California, and has been exhibiting in Los Angeles, New York, and various European cities since 1996.
Michael Reafsnyder is among the small but prominent group of artists who revived painterly traditions in the late 1990s. Critics have described his works as having “Dionysian exuberance,” and as constituting “eloquent arguments against the idea that visual overload necessarily leads to diminished attention spans.”
“Reafsnyder’s bright palette, exaggerated painterly style and figuration meld the expressive power of Abstract Expressionism with the cool of Pop, two primary styles of American art traditionally considered to be polar opposites,” explains Libby Lumpkin. “With uncommon technical refinement and with rock-and-roll energy, Reafsnyder demonstrates the malleability of the painted gesture idiom and asks the viewer to reconsider conventional attitudes toward an acquisitive culture that always wants more — more fun, more food, more paint.”
More is curated by Libby Lumpkin, LVAM Consulting Executive Director and Director of Design Discourse, International Institute of Modern Letters at UNLV. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with color reproductions of selected works and an essay by Libby Lumpkin.
LAS VEGAS ART MUSEUM - LVAM
9600 West Sahara Avenue, Las Vegas, NV 89117
www.lasvegasartmuseum.org
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