"DNA:Work and the Under:Conscious Drawings"
McArthur Binion
Gray Warehouse
2044 West Carroll Ave, Chicago
P: 312.642.8877 F: 312.642.8488 e-mail:
September 10 > October 31, 2020
Gray is pleased to present the gallery’s first solo exhibition with McArthur Binion, and his first in Chicago since 2016. Debuting eight paintings and seven drawings from the artist’s DNA:Work and Under:Conscious Drawings series, the exhibition is open at Gray Warehouse for in-person or virtual viewings by appointment.
THE DNA:WORK PAINTINGS
As an index of time, labor, and identity, Binion's iconic DNA:Work paintings repurpose the Minimalist grid to examine a deeply personal narrative. Using the scale of his own body, Binion builds compositions from vivid, geometric patterns demarcated by an oil-stick grid. Up close, each painting reveals a substrate of tightly collaged and rhythmically arranged reproductions of personal documents, including pages from the artist’s phone book, his birth certificate, and photographs of his childhood home in Macon, Mississippi. Binion’s pared-down combination of color and form compresses a breadth of influences—personal history, relationships, writing, and memory—all absorbed throughout a life dedicated to making. As art critic and poet John Yau describes, Binion’s DNA paintings are “deeper than autobiography… [his] formal mastery, his ability to wring so many possibilities out of his direct and straightforward labor, permeates the works with layers of meaning, beginning with his challenge to the idea that art could be objective and pure, that it could exist in a separate aesthetic realm untainted by life.”[i]
THE DNA:WORK PAINTINGS
As an index of time, labor, and identity, Binion's iconic DNA:Work paintings repurpose the Minimalist grid to examine a deeply personal narrative. Using the scale of his own body, Binion builds compositions from vivid, geometric patterns demarcated by an oil-stick grid. Up close, each painting reveals a substrate of tightly collaged and rhythmically arranged reproductions of personal documents, including pages from the artist’s phone book, his birth certificate, and photographs of his childhood home in Macon, Mississippi. Binion’s pared-down combination of color and form compresses a breadth of influences—personal history, relationships, writing, and memory—all absorbed throughout a life dedicated to making. As art critic and poet John Yau describes, Binion’s DNA paintings are “deeper than autobiography… [his] formal mastery, his ability to wring so many possibilities out of his direct and straightforward labor, permeates the works with layers of meaning, beginning with his challenge to the idea that art could be objective and pure, that it could exist in a separate aesthetic realm untainted by life.”[i]
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McArthur Binion |
open by appointment Wednesday through Friday, 10AM - 5PM, and Saturday, 11AM - 5PM.
