Archie Rand’s solo exhibition of recent paintings, Heads, is on view at Jarvis Art.
Jarvis Art, 96 Bowery, 2nd floor, New York, NY 10013
Opening hours: April 18-May 9; Wednesday – Saturday, 11 am – 6 pm and by appointment
Rand typically produces series of paintings 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 represents 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 structure to his practice. He prefers to focus on a painting as part of a broader, overarching narrative. His paintings are deeply autobiographical, morphing and melding 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 are the child’s affections and attractions to the image when one has not yet been taught to intellectually parse perceptions?
Vivid archetypes of the comic book page produced an atmosphere of pictorial saturation for his generation. Growing up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn in the 1950s, Rand’s first artistic inspiration came from comic books. As Jewish American artists of the 1940s were ostracized from broader artist communities, many 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.
More info on the exhibition here
Archie Rand is an artist from Brooklyn, New York. Rand’s work as a painter and muralist is displayed around the world, including in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. His graphic works and books are in over 400 public collections including the Metropolitan Museum Of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Art Institute Of Chicago, The Brooklyn Museum, The Baltimore Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and The New York Public Library; and are owned by many universities, among which are Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brown, and Johns Hopkins.
