Richard Patterson: I’m Walking Here! - The FLAG Art Foundation, New York

Richard Patterson: I’m Walking Here!
The FLAG Art Foundation, New York
February 8 - May 17, 2014

I’m Walking Here! is a mini-survey and the first comprehensive presentation in New York of Richard Patterson’s career to date. It chronicles the British-born, Dallas-based artist’s many painterly innovations and pop-cultural inspirations and highlights new directions in his work. A veteran of Damien Hirst’s seminal 1988 exhibition Freeze and a leading light in the influential YBA, or Young British Artist, group, Patterson developed an exuberant and sumptuous style he dubs “hyperabstraction.” Made with outrageous skill and humor, his meticulously constructed images combine elements of photorealism and gestural abstraction in an attempt to update the brushy breakthroughs of modernist painting for an era when images travel at the speed of light. They are loaded with countless references -- art-historical, cinematic, historic, and Freudian. To enter the pictorial and psychic space of one of Patterson’s images is to tumble into a fantastical realm in which distinctions between form and symbol, surface and depth, and the sublime and the absurd are lovingly blurred. 

Its title is inspired by a painting "The Kennington Years" that references the 1969 film "Midnight Cowboy" as well as the artist’s own down-and-out early years in a pre-gentrified pocket of London. The exhibition maps Patterson’s intricately interlocking visual universe-one populated by beautiful women, British motorcycles, and outré industrial design objects. In addition to paintings and digital sketches, the installation includes a vintage Matchless Typhoon track bike, a Johansson triplex extending lamp designed in 1919, and, for the first time ever, a selection of the paint-daubed figurines and studio maquettes on which he bases many of his best-known compositions. 

The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the artist by Toby Kamps, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Menil Collection, Houston. 

Richard Patterson was born in the UK in 1963 and graduated from Goldsmiths College in 1986. He is represented by Timothy Taylor Gallery, UK. Richard Patterson was included in Damien Hirst’s Freeze, Surrey Docks, London (1988); as well as Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, USA (1997-00) among other notable exhibitions. He has had solo exhibitions at Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London (1997); James Cohan Gallery, New York, USA (1999 and 2002); Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas, USA (2000), Timothy Taylor Gallery, London (2005, 2008 and 2013); and the Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas, USA (2009). Richard currently lives and works in Dallas, Texas, USA. 

Toby Kamps is the curator of modern and contemporary art at The Menil Collection. Previously, he was senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. He has organized solo exhibitions by artists such as Wols (Wolfgang Schulze), Claes Oldenburg, Ellsworth Kelly, Vanessa Beecroft, Martin Kersels, Adi Nes, Danny Lyon, Torsten Slama, and the collaborative team of John Wood and Paul Harrison. He also has produced numerous thematic survey projects including Silence, The Old, Weird America, Small World: Dioramas in Contemporary Art, and, with a curatorial team, Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art. A graduate of the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art and the Getty Museum Leadership Institute, Kamps has written on extensively on contemporary art and artists.

THE FLAG ART FOUNDATION
545 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001
www.flagartfoundation.org

Richard Patterson, James Cohan Gallery, NYC - New Paintings

Richard Patterson: New Paintings

James Cohan Gallery, New York

October 22 - November 27, 1999

James Cohan Gallery presents an exhibition of new paintings by British painter Richard Patterson. This exhibition of recent work marks the artist's first solo show in New York and coincides with Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, in which Richard Patterson is represented by four earlier paintings.

In this new body of work Richard Patterson transforms a small three-dimensional toy soldier into an action figure of heroic proportions. The process of the transformation is central to Richard Patterson's work. He begins with a toy soldier, layering the surface with paint thereby concealing and distorting its original form. After photographing the altered figure, in which he has manipulated both the scale and the focal point, Richard Patterson meticulously paints images which attain, in one critic's words, "hallucinatory clarity".

There is an inherent contradiction in Richard Patterson's painting. Employing a photorealistic style, they depict an abstraction. There exists a quality of "precise abstraction" that leaves one ambivalent about the figure's status in reality. While they are seductively painted, incorporating a lush palette, the figures verge on the grotesque. In Patterson's hands an innocent toy soldier mutates into a hauntingly surreal character.

Richard Patterson was born in Surrey, England in 1963. He attended Goldsmiths College in England and first came to the forefront of the British contemporary art scene in 1988, showing in the critically acclaimed exhibition Freeze. More recent exhibitions include: Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection organized by the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1997; About Vision, a touring exhibition of New British Painting at Oxford's Museum of Modern Art in 1996; ACE!, an exhibition of the collection of the British Arts Council organized in 1996; among others. His paintings are included in numerous private and public collections in the U.S. and Europe. Richard Patterson lives and works in London.

JAMES COHAN GALLERY

533 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.jamescohan.com