Whitney Museum of American Art
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A painting by Orion Martin. A lamp, flowers, and flat planes do not spatially resolve.

Flatlands
Jan 14–Apr 17, 2016

A painting by Orion Martin. A lamp, flowers, and flat planes do not spatially resolve.

This exhibition brings together paintings by five artists—Nina Chanel Abney, Mathew Cerletty, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Caitlin Keogh, and Orion Martin. Highlighting an engagement with representation among some emerging artists, the works in this group conjure a sense of space that is dimensionless and airless, like the illusionistic scenery flats used on stage and movie sets. Each of these artists fills their compositions with objects, bodies and places that are based on reality, yet are exaggerated, recontextualized, simplified or flattened. The individual works are imbued with both the uncertainty of our sociopolitical moment as well as the seductive quality of consumerism and physical attraction. The paintings in Flatlands invite the viewer to reflect on this ever-present polarity and ambivalence of contemporary life.

Flatlands is organized by assistant curators Laura Phipps and Elisabeth Sherman.

The exhibition will be on view through April 17, 2016 in the John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation Gallery, on the Museum's first floor, which is accessible to the public free-of-charge.

Major support is provided by John R. Eckel Jr. Foundation. 

Generous support is provided by Liz and Jonathan Goldman.

Artworks

Painting of ropes in front of a plate.
Green lampshade with brass base.
Painting of the figure of a woman with instestines and a tassel.
Interior of a fishbowl painted in a super realist style.

Artists

Nina Chanel Abney
Mathew Cerletty
Jamian Juliano-Villani
Caitlin Keogh
Orion Martin

Events

Essay
On Unstable Ground

By Elisabeth Sherman and Laura Phipps

"The artists in Flatlands manipulate their subjects in order to impart their own brands of bizarre unreality."

Read more

INSTALLATION PHOTOGRAPHY

Flatlands exhibit placard with painting next to it.
Gallery with paintings and large central painting in center.
Four paintings on adjacent walls.
Two paintings side by side on a gallery wall.
Two paintings on a gallery wall of Flatlands exhibit.
Gallery view of bench in front of paintings.

In the News

"The works here . . . resemble a kind of Surrealism strained through Pop Art, a mix of sharp contours and taut surfaces channeling content that’s less about a metaphysical truth rooted in the subconscious than it is about consciousness as artifice."
—TimeOut NY

"'Flatlands,' Where the Familiar Becomes Hypnotically Strange"
—The New York Times

"An unusually fast-thinking museum show"
—W Magazine