New Realisms
Bruno Perillo, Edward del Rosario, Adam Stennett, Barnaby Whitfield,
Eric White
Through October 27
Irvine Contemporary
1412 14th St., NW
Washington, DC 20005
1-202-332-8767
http://www.irvinecontemporary.com
Irvine Contemporary is pleased to present New Realisms, an exhibition featuring recent works by Bruno Perillo, Edward del Rosario, Adam Stennett, Eric White, and Barnaby Whitfield. The artists in the exhibition are all in their 30s, based in New York, and have already made a mark by developing their own distinctive arguments for the role of realist styles of painting in a post-photography, post-digital, and “post-everything” visual culture.
The artists in New Realisms represent a generation of artists who are reworking questions about realist styles and codes in painting today. The working context now takes for granted painters like Gerhard Richter and John Currin, whose works embody arguments about possible kinds of conceptual and non-representational realism, but also the works of artists associated with recent pop surrealism and photorealism. The artists in New Realisms also show that painters today are not only confronting the “burden of the past” in art history and engaging in a debate with their contemporaries; they are in dialog with a wide array of visual codes and information from all media, especially photography, film, digital imagery, and the hyperreal images of advertising and contemporary cinema.
In many ways comparable to the 1920s and 30s, when painters came to terms with photography, the critique of the avant-garde, and the rise of commercial media, many painters today are now engaged in a full debate with our culture’s construction of “the real” and with the closely related codes for fantasy, fiction, and the imaginary.
New Realisms opens up the question of the styles of image making at a time when we’ve come to see that “the real” is a bundle of visual codes with no necessary connection to “reality.” The artists show that multiple “realisms” are continually being reinterpreted and redeployed to present, question, and challenge what we can — and desire to — visualize.
Now available:
Video of panel discussion with the artists of New Realisms
Georgetown University, September 12, 2009
Invited panelists:
Dorothy Kosinski, Director, Phillips Collection
Vesela Sretenovic, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Phillips Collection
Alison Hilton, Professor of Art History, Georgetown University
Artists: Adam Stennett, Edward Del Rosario, Bruno Perillo, Barnaby Whitfield
Moderator: Martin Irvine
Exhibition information:
Gallery site
Slideshow of artist’s works
Panel discussion with the artists at Georgetown University (video)
Press release with images (pdf)
For media inquiries and information about available works, contact:
Lauren Gentile, Assistant Director & Director of Sales
lauren [at] irvinecontemporary.com
1-202-332-8767
