Enrico Riley: Stand
Jenkins Johnson Projects, Brooklyn, NY
September 10 – October 29, 2022
Together 2, 2022
Oil on canvas, 58 x 54 in
Courtesy of Enrico Riley
and Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco and New York
Together IV, 2022
Oil on canvas, 58 x 54 in
Courtesy of Enrico Riley
and Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco and New York
Jenkins Johnson Projects presents ENRICO RILEY’s solo exhibition Stand. The exhibition explores the materiality of paint and the expressive potential of painted images in relation to issues around identity and visibility. This is Enrico Riley’s second solo exhibition at Jenkins Johnson Projects.
Enrico Riley’s new series of paintings investigate the agency of bodies moving through space with dance. The artist uses formal techniques to expose the issues surrounding mobility through the flattening and abstracting of figures within a liminal space. Enrico Riley’s new body of work is inspired by and expands on the rich and complex traditions of hip-hop and other forms of street dance and in particular the way these activities allow individuals to expand their presence in space. This new series is a result of the artist thinking about hip-hop, break dance, and rap culture of the 1980s and 1990s and reflecting on the significance of these expressions on American culture. The artist uses a vibrant palette of monochromes such as magentas, greens, and yellows to highlight the role fashion played, with sneakers and polo shirts turning into identity markers. The result on the canvas is an homage to energy and expression. Building space through color and absences, Enrico Riley invites the viewer to question the ephemerality of the body.
Flattening the space and abstracting the figures, Enrico Riley mixes forms, bodies, colors, and atmosphere, to visualize how bodies can become vehicles of colors. Loosely thinking about the California Light and Space artists, Enrico Riley’s work carries a strong impression of color light that floods out of his canvases into the space. The simplicity and ease of the painted forms suggest a range of attitudes and, at times, contradict themselves in unexpected ways. For example, Enrico Riley often depicts the human form accompanied by complicated shadows which create a glitch in the perceptual space, making the bodies solid or light — and always in flux. Blurring the line between figuration and abstraction, Enrico Riley invites the viewer to keep an open mind and reading of his paintings, and to reflect on dance as a form of personal, social, and political expression.
ENRICO RILEY (b. 1973, Westbury, CT) is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Visual Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize in Painting and holds the George Frederick Jewitt Professorship in Art at Dartmouth College. Enrico Riley has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the American Academy in Rome, the University of New Hampshire, and Jenkins Johnson Projects. He has participated in group exhibitions at “State of the Art 2020” at Crystal Bridges Museum of Art and “Black Bodies on the Cross” at The Hood Museum. His work is in institutions including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Hood Museum, and Nasher Sculpture Center. Enrico Riley has an MFA in painting from Yale University and a BA in Visual Studies from Dartmouth College. Enrico Riley lives and works in Vermont and New Hampshire.
The exhibition is accompanied with a catalogue featuring an essay by Connie Choi, Associate Curator, Permanent Collection, The Studio Museum in Harlem.
JENKINS JOHNSON PROJECTS
207 Ocean Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11225
