Joe Reihsen. About Face

About

Building intensity (and skill) through past shows at galleries around the world and international art fairs, it seems surprising that this well-known young artist has yet to have a full exhibition here in our city. This show will use all galleries in our entire 3,800 sq. ft. space for our November–December show opening November 5 and running through the end of December.

This exhibition will include a selection of the artist’s most challenging paintings from his most well-known series and for the first time will show his largest works to date in our Gallery 3. Works from three feet to twenty feet will be in exhibition.

Reihsen’s paintings are very important to see in person, hence our excitement about having them here for the first time in a thorough and extensive show. He makes abstract works in a new way, handmade paintings that are so eye dazzling and surreal as to look like fancy digital prints. This combo of traditional painting and a geeked-out digital aesthetic comes natural to the artist who grew up in the 80s, as digital imaging technology spread and shaped our pictorial thinking.

The paintings combine loose backgrounds, spray, and “quoted” brushstrokes that are painted on mylar, sprayed then peeled up and collaged onto the painting. These details quote painting as a genre, containing all the history of the brushstroke in a lifted note, the same way in the computer you might copy and paste, scale up or down, invert hue, blast saturation, push contrast and apply filters of texture to “painting”.

With airbrush he can soften focus; with peeled up sheets he can make pachydermal paint “skins”, through angled spray he can pull out dramatic topography; Reihsen uses an assortment of these innovative paint moments to create panel paintings that feel deep and endless, holographic at times, and dynamically futuristic.