Michael Cline
16 Sep - 17 Oct 2009
MICHAEL CLINE
"Pre-Code"
September 16, 2009 - October 17, 2009
Daniel Reich Gallery is pleased to present a new exhibition of drawings by Michael Cline as part of a two-gallery show with Marc Jancou Contemporary. Daniel Reich Gallery will focus on Cline’s distinct but related pastel works which capture the artist’s rabid curiosity, free-ranging experimentation and occur like irrational traces of anger and discontent.
With an artist like Jim Shaw as a precedent and an interest in the concerns of thirties cartooning, Cline’s pastel work reveals the artist at his most essential and his predisposition for the “ugly” side of America. As Cline notes, “like film stills or comic book cells, each pastel follows the work, beliefs and feelings of a misfit who is an amalgamation of the perfect American crank...” For instance, Cline has been fascinated by the “lunatic fringe” as expressed in the activities of groups like the “birthers”. In his pastels, he is able to expresses what might be the root of that language. If the painted figures in Jancou’s exhibition lack bodily coherence, the pastels in Reich1s show capture body parts as pieces making rudimentary gestures - kicking and pointing. The spaces are shallow defined by cinderblock and plywood over broken windows in front of which traces of furtive human scrawling like a cardboard sign reading: “lost everything to the new world order...” Drawings within drawings proliferate such as the enticing bathroom scribble: Call Charlotte. Fear, paranoia and sparseness of the compositions furthermore capture a sense of loss of coherent context and spatial parameters.
"Pre-Code"
September 16, 2009 - October 17, 2009
Daniel Reich Gallery is pleased to present a new exhibition of drawings by Michael Cline as part of a two-gallery show with Marc Jancou Contemporary. Daniel Reich Gallery will focus on Cline’s distinct but related pastel works which capture the artist’s rabid curiosity, free-ranging experimentation and occur like irrational traces of anger and discontent.
With an artist like Jim Shaw as a precedent and an interest in the concerns of thirties cartooning, Cline’s pastel work reveals the artist at his most essential and his predisposition for the “ugly” side of America. As Cline notes, “like film stills or comic book cells, each pastel follows the work, beliefs and feelings of a misfit who is an amalgamation of the perfect American crank...” For instance, Cline has been fascinated by the “lunatic fringe” as expressed in the activities of groups like the “birthers”. In his pastels, he is able to expresses what might be the root of that language. If the painted figures in Jancou’s exhibition lack bodily coherence, the pastels in Reich1s show capture body parts as pieces making rudimentary gestures - kicking and pointing. The spaces are shallow defined by cinderblock and plywood over broken windows in front of which traces of furtive human scrawling like a cardboard sign reading: “lost everything to the new world order...” Drawings within drawings proliferate such as the enticing bathroom scribble: Call Charlotte. Fear, paranoia and sparseness of the compositions furthermore capture a sense of loss of coherent context and spatial parameters.