Exhibition

Gyan Shrosbree: The Dress / What Touches The Floor

14 Jan 2023 – 25 Feb 2023

Regular hours

Saturday
13:00 – 18:00
by appointment
Sunday
13:00 – 18:00
by appointment

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About

Brooklyn, NY (January 2, 2023) — Ortega y Gasset Projects proudly presents a solo show opening on Saturday, January 14, GYAN SHROSBREE: The Dress / What Touches the Floor, co-curated by OyG Co-directors Clare Britt, Leeza Meksin, Nickola Pottinger, Adam Liam Rose, Zahar Vaks, and Lauren Whearty. The exhibition, activating both the main gallery and The Skirt, will be on view through February 25, 2023. 

For this presentation, the artist will be showing a series of large scale paintings on tarp and stretched canvas, comprising figures paired with pairs of shoes, encircling the main gallery. In the Skirt space, Shrosbree will create a site-responsive installation of her playful and colorful paintings that range in size from bossy large-scale to tiny and intimate.

Shrosbree’s subject matter deals with female-bodied, dressed-up figures, evoking fashion’s ability to signify self-determination, agency and empowerment. This is a feminist point of view - full of spirited resistance to the austere modernist and minimalist ideals still circulating today. 

Shrosbree addresses the emotional, personal and political content in her work by asserting: “There is a psychological note that I want to hit upon, somewhere between extreme discomfort and pure joy. The feeling that our hands are too big and our outfit too fluffy. Once again, you arrive at the party in the wrong attire feeling exposed and without your armor. Or the opposite, the armor is just right and you feel powerful and protected by the colors that surround you.”

In Shrosbree’s chosen list of materials, further content can be gleaned. The supports for her large scale figures are tarps –flexible, unfixed and utilitarian. They can be rolled up easily and hung in a variety of ways suggesting make-shift, temporary home structures, or the processes associated with fixing, rebuilding, repainting, redoing. Pairing paintings on tarps with the more conventional stretched canvases, the implied hierarchies within fine and applied arts are playfully debunked. What is the difference and similarities between dressing up our bodies, dressing up our paintings and dressing up our homes? 

When looking at the world through the eyes of Gyan Shrosbree we start to see that the questions and answers play charades, while finding pleasure in dress-up, juicy colors, flattened shapes, awkwardness, and masquerade.

For the opening on Saturday, January 14th, the artist has also made a fashion line of wearable art, in collaboration with her mother, Kathleen Shrosbree. Gyan paints her vibrant imagery onto unstretched cotton duck, and Kathleen patterns and sews the individual pieces, ranging from tunics to tote bags. The OyG co-director artists will all be modeling the various items at the opening, made specifically for the occasion.                                          

Text by Leeza Meksin

Exhibiting artistsToggle

Gyan Shrosbree

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