Archie Rand
Heads
Opening reception: 6-8 pm, Wednesday March 18
96 Bowery, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10013
March 19 – May 2, 2026
Jarvis Art presents Archie Rand’s solo exhibition of recent paintings, Heads.
Rand typically produces series of paintings that begin with themes derived from contemporary poetry, Scripture or the art canon but his most recent works are created with a less specific premise. The series exhibited in Heads represent a form of metaphysical figuration in which fundamental questions regarding reality and existence are confronted. Situations override protagonists and initial interpretations require closer consideration. This highly idiosyncratic visual language is devoid of inhibition and driven by a recklessly unaccountable imagination.
Rand’s relentless engagement with series represents an anthology that provides a coherent sensibility. He prefers to focus on a painting being part of a broader, overarching narrative. His paintings are deeply autobiographical as they morph and meld poignantly imbued source material. The humanity visible in his raucous and lurid colored tableaux is anchored in the experiences of his life. Rand is concerned with engaging a discursive and emotional fact. He asks what were the child’s affections and attractions to the image when one has not yet been taught to intellectually parse perceptions?
| His voracious consumption of images, which started early as a young child, can be interpreted as foreseeing the ocean of images we experience through our screens every day in contemporary culture. He considers a prescient questioning of technology, which upends any hope of belief in the validity of any image, asking what can we really know, now, from pictures? There is a foreboding in his work that sidles up to our current unease.Growing up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn in the 1950s, the vivid archetypes of the comic book page produced an atmosphere of pictorial saturation for his generation. American Jewish artists of the 1940s, ostracized from broader artist communities, engaged in comics, which some artists instinctively recognized as a Jewish visual language. Illustrators such as Will Eisner and fellow Lafayette High School alum, Maurice Sendak, specialized in caricature that influenced that sense of displacement in Rand’s work. Andrew Woolbright has referred to this as “the edge of representation so as to profane it, and in so doing releasing a deeper truth and our fear of its acknowledgement.” |
| As some artists age, the question of what can be true observation occurs and interrogating memory uncovers a source for this crucial early appetite, one that was devoid of instruction. There is no irony here. This is affection made corporeal and it is a gift of that revelation. Rand sees that in older artists there is a reversion to instinct. Sendak digs up Laurel and Hardy, Malcolm Morley paints recall of the V-2 blitzes on London, Joan Snyder’s insistence on the integrity of impulse becomes increasingly injected with diary and Guston paints his early fascination with cartoons. As a product of postwar American urban culture, Rand was immersed in the remains of early twentieth century children’s story books. It’s worth noting that these were produced at a time when print was the main medium for the dissemination of images and these were painted by highly gifted illustrators. Rand’s paintings repurpose fairy tale iconography including clowns, knights, witches and idealized families to express current real-life anxieties and vulnerabilities. Discussing this dynamic, Barry Schwabsky has noted that Rand’s work “inspires imagery worthy of the world’s most profound children’s book.” Archie Rand (b.1949 Brooklyn, New York) lives and works in New York. He attended the Art Students League and later received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in cinegraphics from Pratt Institute. Rand held his New York solo exhibition at Tibor de Nagy in 1972 at the age of 23. He went on to have eight solo exhibitions with the gallery, through to the early 1980s. In 1976 Rand completed an 18,000 square foot mural at the B’nai Yosef Synagogue in Brooklyn. Throughout the 1980s, he presented solo exhibitions at Phyllis Kind’s galleries in New York and Chicago. In 2025, Rand held solo exhibitions at Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin and Below Grand, New York. For over three decades he has continued to collaborate and publish with noted poets such as Robert Creeley and John Ashbery. Rand’s work is held in public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Jewish Museum New York, The Brooklyn Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Dallas Museum of Art, The Smithsonian Institution and The Carnegie Museum of Art. Rand is currently Presidential Professor of Art at Brooklyn College and prior to this was the chair of the Department of Visual Arts at Columbia University, New York. |