JAMES ENGLISH LEARY
Hoi Polloi
October 31 - December 16, 2018
Hoi Polloi, James English Leary’s first exhibition with Nathalie Karg Gallery, presents nine new paintings from the artist’s most recent body of work.
Nine wooden silhouette-shaped panels contain interloping shapes and transversing bodies. In some works, narrative is winnowed to a single gesture: a crosstown foot, an elbow-in-the-orgy, a nose inquiring towards a windowsill pie. In others, colliding forms creep insidiously at the periphery, like dawning realizations or suppressed thoughts, leaving exposed the panel’s veneered wood ground—a wreck-room (or Woodie station-wagon) of the mind. The projection of body parts onto, into and through the profile silhouettes—and the containment of depicted space within actual space—enacts camp-psychological satires of interpretation and self-knowledge.
The exhibition’s title, Hoi Polloi, Greek for “the people” (or in the strictest sense “the many”), likely comes to English scholars through the 5th-century B.C. Funeral Oration of Pericles who invoked it approvingly and in contrast with ‘hoi oligoi’ (“the few”) in praising Athenian democracy. It has since come to possess a decidedly negative connotation and is used to signify the working class, the herd of commoners, the masses, the great unwashed, the plebeians or “plebs”, the ‘canaille’, the proles (as in “the proletariats”), the rabble, the riffraff, the lower order, the mob and the dregs of society.
About James English Leary
James English Leary is a New York-based artist. He received his B.F.A. from Cooper Union in 2004. His paintings enact concrete comedies out of the medium’s component parts to satirize follies of the mind and body. He is a Tiffany Foundation Award recipient and a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation resident. Leary’s works have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Whitney Biennial,…
James English Leary / Hoi Polloi
James English Leary, Reluctant Capitalist (Profile of the Human Barnyard), 2018, acrylic on shaped panel, 50 1/2 x 40 1/2 in, (128.27 x 102.87 cm)
James English Leary, Proud Coward (A Profile in Courage), 2018, acrylic on shaped panel, 48 x 35 in, (121.92 x 88.90 cm)
James English Leary, Bored Dissident (Profile of the First Time Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader Fucked), 2018, acrylic on shaped panel, 47 x 49 in, (119.38 x 124.46 cm)
James English Leary, Sad Communist (Profile of Mindless Entertainments Earned Through Hard Work), 2018, acrylic on shaped panel, 47 x 45 in, (119.38 x 114.30 cm)
James English Leary, Depressed Teacher (Profile in the Policing of Meaning), 2018, acrylic on shaped panel, 50 x 51 in, (127 x 129.54 cm)
James English Leary, Casual Lover (Profile of a Person in Debt), 2018, acrylic on shaped panel, 48 x 55 in, (121.92 x 139.70 cm)
James English Leary, Shameless Artist (Profile of Life in a Banana Republic), 2018, acrylic on shaped panel, 56 x 46 in. (142.24 x 116.84 cm)
James English Leary, Provincial Celebrity (Profile of a Person in Denial), 2018, acrylic on shaped panel, 48 x 46 in, (121.92 x 116.84 cm)
James English Leary, Lonely Hippie 1, 2018, acrylic on shaped canvas, 47 x 37 in, (119.38 x 93.98 cm)