Cheyney Thompson
1998
March 13 - April 10, 2004
Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to present 1998, an exhibition of new paintings by Cheyney Thompson. This is the artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery.
1998 is a panoramic installation of more than 130 paintings, spanning three walls of the gallery. Painted in acrylics on stretched, raw linen, all of the paintings on a single wall share a common vanishing point. In the direct center of the gallery is a bunker constructed of sandbags and white plastic casts of wooden planks which complicates access to the optimal viewing point, offering this "white cube" as a contestable place.
While Thompson's previous exhibitions have often referenced painting practice by way of a dialogue with specific paintings - most recently, Gericault's Raft of The Medusa for his exhibition "1816" at Sutton Lane in London. With "1998," the artist refers to a time during which he "helped establish an artist-run gallery which facilitated the conception of itself as a specifically public and temporary autonomous site which could stand in opposition to the logic of markets." The paintings reference barricades and provisional architecture constructed from rusty corrugated metal, pieces of drywall and chipboard, and pieced-together 2x4s. While these paintings are purposefully fragmentary, the exhibition itself is offered as a theater in which to consider the incomplete in a temporarily coherent way.