New Paintings
Colby Currie
February 19th - April 2nd
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Galleri Urbane is pleased to introduce Amarillo, Texas artist Colby Currie in his first solo exhibition with the gallery. New Paintings pulls together a selection of canvases completed over recent years, highlighting the mereological approach that remains central to Currie’s studio practice.
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Exhibition Install Images:
When creating a body of paintings, Currie maintains that the whole is nothing without its parts. Before relocating to Amarillo in December of 2021, the walls of his Dallas studio could accommodate either 9 small scale paintings or 3 large scale paintings at a time. At maximum capacity, the artist could work across each canvas concurrently, allowing them to influence one another and reach maturity as a cohort. In the paintings on view, Currie utilizes acrylic, oil, spray paint, and collaged sections of canvas to build a visual vocabulary made in reaction to the ever-changing natural and urban landscapes he inhabits. Smears, stains, transfers, and trails of spray paint are found throughout, yet utilized in ways that often produce starkly different effects. In each work, Currie cultivates an inquisitive exploration of implied and physical space.
For the artist, a successful painting is deceivingly simple. What may look like it happened in a quick and effortless manner is actually the result of careful consideration and complex processes. The construction required to create one of the show’s more minimal-appearing works, Painting 28 (2021), for example, might go unnoticed: a strip of stained canvas has been inverted and sewn into the composition. The pursuit of this is driven by Currie’s interest in the natural world, where stains and patinas build up naturally even without the intervention of people. Currie seeks to capture this in his paintings, where there are no signs of a hand wielding a brush but rather nature carrying out its own will.
Currie’s work joins the canon of color field painters and abstract expressionists, executed with techniques and materials that place it firmly in the contemporary. Rich with subtle details, each work stands alone while in constant dialogue with the adjacent paintings.
Colby Currie (b.1982) earned his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of North Texas. Colby has developed an aesthetic that embodies discussions on natural and urban vestiges combined with a deconstructed approach to painting. Currie lives and works in Amarillo, TX where he is the Curator of Education at the Amarillo Museum of Art.