Blair Whiteford

Brooklyn, NY

January 19 - February 28 , 2021

Sponsored by Leslie and Michael Weissman

BIO

(b. 1990, BriarcliffManor) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.He received his MFA from Yale Universty and BFA from Ringling College of Art and Design. Recent solo and two person exhitions include Sowing a Seed On a Field Made of Ash at Jack Barrett Gallery NY, Flesh Beloved, Slipping Window Union Pacific, London, UK, 2019 and Hoodwinked With Rory Rosenberg, Gern NY, New York, NY, 2017. Recent awards include Cape Ann Art Museum Award for Excellence in Landscape Painting (2018), and the Joan Mitchell Foundation fellowship recipient (2013).

ARTIST STATEMENT

“I am interested in finding new challenges for the practice of depicting thehuman body. The abstraction in my paintings is a depiction of the visual dialogue between preexisting forms and systems in the world. In mypaintings I use a combination of figures, systems, and objects to createhuman figures that exist as their biological selves as well as themanifestation of an experience or ideology. My explorations of the humanfigure act as a tool for me to attempt an understanding of forces such asmortality, time, history, nature and my own identity that feel beyond myunderstanding.I define ‘the body’ as a single structure that functions with thecooperation of a series of independent forces. Systems of infrastructure,such as highways or water systems create a system for directingindependent entities for a common function similar to a biologicalcirculatory system. In this I consider infrastructure figurative as both acountry and a human body have forms of circulatory systems. A country isin this sense a sort of incidental figure painting. I am interested in modelssuch as this as my paintings attempt to blur the dividing line between thefigure and the forces and environments that they inherently embody.”

ARTIST LINKS

Website: blairwhiteford.com

Instagram: @blairwhiteford