HALSEY MCKAY GALLERY
Opening Saturday, October 3, 2 - 4 PM | 79 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY
On view: October 3 - November 14 | Friday - Monday 11am - 5pm 
 
For sales and press inquiries please email info@halseymckay.com 
 
PATRICK BRENNAN - LIFE RAFT
 
Patrick Brennan, Life Raft in progress, Ithaca, NY, September, 2020
 
Halsey McKay is thrilled to present Life Raft, our fourth solo exhibition with Patrick Brennan. Brennan has spent the last few years in upstate New York expanding his unique visual language and earning an MFA from Cornell University. Brennan’s new paintings, installation and video work depict a vast and complicated space with intimate openings, windows and portals that peer into places flowing with wonder. Questioning traditionally perceived ideas of the sublime, the viewer experiences a series of appearingly chaotic choices and materials. With content blurred there is no easy way to formulate what each work is about, giving the viewer time to look and the space to engage with the various pieces teeming with collage and layered paint. Using any means necessary - acrylic paint, spray paint, foam, popsicle sticks, ink, mylar, lava lamps, wooden crates, branches, colored pencils, wood, silk and glitter…the materials become characters that reflect a dream-like landscape that we are physically placed within. Life Raft is accompanied by a collaborative soundtrack between Brennan and JD Walsh of Shy Layers.
 
Brennan’s own language for making paintings starts with a library of shapes, colors, and compositions. These core elements are universal to his experience of both painting and nature. He approaches abstraction in the same manner as he approaches the environment, knowing to expect the unexpected. Driven by a curiosity that includes both speculation and doubt this manifests into an art experience that conjures a feeling, a force, and a little unease. 
 
The mise en scene of Life Raft is dense with heavily saturated, unearthly colors and textures juxtaposed to evoke a specific feeling of newness. Glue, paper, foam, popsicle sticks, other paintings, and glitter are adhered to the surfaces. Brennan culls from both fine art and craft supplies and fabrics, smaller paintings and objects are festooned directly to the surfaces of the paintings. Details of varying finish; texture and color modulate and take on more significance with repeated viewing. Brennan’s output is a continuous exercise in making and looking rather than the pursuit of a conclusion. He explores and investigates every idea, stumbling into chance and wonder, searching for unexpected outcomes. 
 
Patrick Brennan was born in Syracuse, NY and currently lives and works in Ithaca. Recent solo exhibitions have been at Cornell University Ithaca, NY;  Halsey McKay, East Hampton; Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco; Essex Flowers, New York; as well as group shows at MOMA / PS1, Galerie Lelong, Safe Gallery, Jack Hanley Gallery, Nicole Klagsbrun, Monya Rowe Gallery, Zieher Smith, Edward Thorpe, Artists Space and Clifton Benevento, New York; Cooper Cole, Toronto, and V1, Copenhagen, Denmark. He is a recipient of the NYFA fellowship in painting, a founding member of Essex Flowers in New York City, and has been a visiting artist and lecturer to the US Embassy in Bahrain, Alfred University, Bennington College and others. Brennan is represented by Halsey McKay Gallery.

 

 
Upstairs: SCOTT OLSON 
Scott Olson, Untitled, 2020, Oil on linen with artist frame, 14.5 x 16.5 inches (36.8 x 41.9 cm)
 

Halsey McKay is thrilled to present Scott Olson’s first solo show with the gallery. Olson’s newest body of work is geometric, organic and grounded in a fascination with music, improvisation and  performance. The six paintings on view embody musicality and the room invokes a rhythmic visual concert that plays like improvised jazz.

 

Scott Olson’s studio practice is ever evolving with the reimagining and creation of new painting tools and approaches to layering. His unique mark-making is realized by combining brushes with unconventional tools he collects or constructs himself. By layering, masking and scraping, the compositions of each work are a record of his movements as he labors to pack intesity into a compact area. He is observant of the power material properties have to dictate a works’s final outcome, the subtlety of variables and the finality of the results on the whole. 

 

The paintings come into being slowly and methodically. Each composition emerges as signals from mark, shape and color placement call for responses. The final act is the framing which Olson himself conctructs and stains as both compositional device and demarker of his actions. Olson’s approach to painting calls upon questions that science and alchemy ask about final form, as much as those of painting’s own history.

 

Describing his work Roberta Smith wrote “the intently improvised geometries of Olson…evoke manuscript illumination filtered through Constructivism and other abstract styles. His colors have…a retroactive subtlety; frequently the are translucent, to reveal the complex decisions and elaborate processes packed into each work. The forms are laid on in thin glazes with fine, varied textures, creating echo chambers of form that suggest jewels, flattened out.”

 

Scott Olson (b. 1976, Syracuse, New York) has been the subject of several solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin and Stockholm. In 2017, the Cleveland Museum of Art organized a solo exhibition of his work, presented at the Transformer Station, Cleveland, OH. His work is included in the permanent collections of institutions including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Olson has been included inumerous group exhibitions, including City Prince/sses, curated by Chris Sharp, at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2019); The Great Lakes Research, a part of FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art at the Cleveland Institute of Art (2018); The Young Years at the Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College; Realization is Better than Anticipation, MOCA Cleveland (2013) and Painter Painter at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2013). The artist currently lives and works in Kent, Ohio.
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