Michael Reafsnyder

About

Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Michael Reafsnyder, on view at 525 West 22nd Street from 28 March through 11 May 2024. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, March 28 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm. This is Reafsnyder’s eighth exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition is accompanied by a digital catalogue with an essay by Julian Hoeber. 

Reafsnyder’s exuberant and celebratory paintings relish in delight, glee, and exhilaration. They refuse the notion that gestural painting emerges from the anguish of life; they reject both easy existentialism and sentimental pathos. The sheer pleasure of viewing Reafsnyder’s nuanced surfaces is stimulated by their abundance of vividly saturated colors, their profusion of painterly gestures, and their array of enigmatic compositions. Rather than romanticizing a past set of values, or anticipating future ones, the paintings render palpable a present moment in our experience of visual imagery. In his art, the actual contingencies of viewing and the pictorial conditions for communication meet in a cacophony of all-or-nothing enthusiasm. 

Julian Hoeber writes, “Paint is a material. It is organized in a painting by play and discovery. That organizing will inevitably produce arrangements of paint that generate meaning, be they ghostly faces or histories or sense tingling fields of color. The sensations have affect and are not neutral. The histories aren’t either, but Reafsnyder won’t let them be albatrosses. He comes to them with other things— his proclivities and tastes, his peculiar banks of knowledge, the limits of his particular physical self— that let those histories go off on tangents, turn into jokes or open up on more possibilities for play.” 

Michael Reafsnyder (b. 1969 in Orange, CA) received his Master of Fine Arts degree at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA in 1996 where he studied under Mike Kelley and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. 

Reafsnyder has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City, CA; Galería Marta Cervera, Madrid, Spain; Blum and Poe, Santa Monica, CA; Las Vegas Art Museum, NV; Uplands Gallery, Melbourne, Australia; W.C.C.A., Singapore, and elsewhere. 

His work has been included in group exhibitions including “Step Into Liquid” (curated by Dave Hickey), Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles; “Los Angeles Ceramic Museum of Art,” ACME, Los Angeles; “Fresh Paint,” Galerie Eugene Lendl, Graz, Austria, “Black Dragon Society,” Black Dragon Society, Los Angeles; and “New Work: Abstract Painting,” Todd Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, among others. 

Reafsnyder’s work can be found in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; Columbus Museum of Art, OH; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Las Vegas Art Museum, NV; Portland Art Museum, OR; Weisman Museum of Art, Los Angeles; and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN, among others. 

The artist lives and works in Southern California.