The Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to present Cheyney Thompson’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery entitled Birdwings and Chambered Shells. The show will include paintings and a set of drawings, all with new optimized titles. Thompson’s latest series of works continue his investigation of the technology, production and distribution of painting. The works on view are based on the random walk algorithm, a formalization of Brownian motion that is used in financial instruments to model market behavior.
Combining models of standardization, in the use of Munsell’s color system, with models of dynamic processes, in the use of random walks, the resulting works attempt to trace a line between painting’s twin imperatives of capture and exposure.
The show takes its title from Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis, from hedge fund manager’s Eric Packer’s hyperbolic ode to the Efficient Market Hypothesis, in which he claims to recognize the “heave of the biosphere” in the streams of numbers and charts of currency indexes.
Cheyney Thompson has had solo exhibitions at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (with an accompanying monograph), and the Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany; and his work was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Group shows include: Une Histoire, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, Chat Jet - Painting ‘Beyond’ The Medium at Künstlerhaus Graz; The Indiscipline of Painting, Tate St. Ives, England; Systems Analysis at West London Projects and Langen Foundation, Germany; Greater New York at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and The Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy in 2003.
Cheyney Thompson’s work is part of the permanent collections of MoMA, New York and Centre Pompidou, Paris.