Peter Blum is pleased to announce a three-person exhibition of new works by Graham Durward, Irina Rozovsky, and Roger White. Exalted Position will be on view at Peter Blum Gallery, 20 West 57th Street, New York from June 30 through August 31. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, June 30, from 6 to 8 pm.
The paintings and photographs in this exhibition depict objects and scenes from everyday life: an arrangement of silk flowers, a reflection of a wall in a hallway mirror, incense smoke in the corner of a room, a tree stump, a motorcyclist standing on a desolate road. Exalted Position suggests that something can be made or designated as “important”—that an object or place can rise above its material status into the realm of the spiritual or the symbolic. Through their works, the artists in this exhibition offer entry points into the possibility of gleaning transcendent meaning out of mundane and ordinary moments.
Graham Durward will present a group of paintings from several evolving bodies of work; from semiabstract renderings of burning incense to densely saturated depictions of harlequin patterns. Durward’s loose brushwork pushes and pulls the surfaces of his paintings between abstraction and representation, always slipping away from straightforward definitions. Depictions of smoke melt into swirling abstract fields while geometric abstractions reverberate with a sense of absence and immateriality.
Irina Rozovsky’s series A Rock that Floats conveys a heavy, nearly mystical encounter with the everyday American landscape. These photographs were made with a portable film camera over various road trips through the United States between 2013-15. Rozovsky has recently printed the work in the color darkroom— an analog and nearly extinct method of making color prints that allows for a subtle shifting of hues away from faithful depictions and casts the images in the shadow of memories and illusion.
Roger White’s paintings delve into the iconography of the mundane. In this exhibition White will present a group of new paintings that depict household objects and settings. Each work is an abstraction or fragmentation of the subjective experience of looking, in which the vantage point of the artists is perpetually challenged, questioned, or reaffirmed. The works come across both as a measured analysis of discrete objects and a poetic meditation on the practice of daily life.
Graham Durward was in born in 1966 in Aberdeen, UK, and lives and works in New York. He graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 1977 and studied at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 1986. Previous solo exhibitions have included Kai Matsumiya(2016) , 33 Orchard curated by Michael Steinberg (2014). Maureen Paley London (2009), White Columns, New York (2007), Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (1997), Patrick Gallery, New York (1994), Shedhalle, Zurich (1993), Sandra Gering Gallery (1992). Recent group exhibitions have included Vox Populi Philadelphia (2011), The Hidden, Maureen Paley, London (2008), Looking Back, White Columns, New York (2006), 20th Anniversary Show, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York (2003), Under Pressure, Swiss Institute, New York (2000), I LOVE NY Video Show curated by Graham Durward for The Edinburgh International Festival (1998), Gender Affects, Kinsey Institute, Indiana University (1996), The Masculine Masquerade, curated by Andrew Perchuk and Helaine Posner, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (1995), The Use of Pleasure, curated by Robert Nickas, Terrain, San Francisco, CA (1994).
Irina Rozovsky was born in 1981 in Moscow, USSR and lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts. She received her BA in French and Spanish Literature from Tufts University and an MFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally with solo exhibitions at the Southeast Museum of Photography, Florida (2013); Breda International Photography Festival (2012) and Noorderlicht Photo Festival, the Netherlands; Kassel Fotobook Festival, Documenta Halle, Germany. Group exhibitions include the Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee; Chelsea Art Museum of Art, New York; Architectural Association of London; and Galeria Fifty24MX, Mexico City. Her first monograph One to Nothing was published in 2011 and her second monograph Island on my Mind, winner of Kassel Photobook Festival’s Dummy Award, was published in 2015. She is currently Assistant Professor of Photography at Massachusetts College of Art and recipient of the 2015 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship.
Roger White was born in 1976 in Salem, Oregon, and lives and works in Middlebury, Vermont and Brooklyn, New York. White received his MFA from Columbia University in 2000. Recent exhibitions include Three Way Weekend at Blum and Poe and ALAC, Los Angeles (2015); The Crystal Palace at Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York (2014); and The Room and its Inhabitants at Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto, Ontario (2013). White is also a founding editor of the journal Paper Monument and author of The Contemporaries, Bloomsbury (2015). His work is included in the permanent collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York and the Cleveland Museum of Art in Cleveland, Ohio. He is represented by Rachel Uffner Gallery in New York and Grice Bench in Los Angeles.