Andrew Falkowski
Challenging the ideas around contemporary painting, Andrew Falkowski presents graphic paintings replete with cross cultural references such as Mondrian, Nick Lowe, The Germs, Tame Impala, Asics Running Shoes, Roy Lichtenstein’s late Ben Day dots, The Beach Boys, and the artist Sarah Morris. These references and his approach all pose questions about the state of things and ask “what goes from here?”
In On to the Next One, Falkowski's fourth solo show at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, two bodies of artwork confront us: paintings on paper as well as paintings on aluminum panel. Careful attention is given to systems of organization. Precision, grid schemes, saturated color charts, and patterning are all employed, only to be disrupted with various breaks in the order and surface. The effect is sometimes intense, with a feeling of ruptured space and at other times subtle with a slight tonal change of color or structure, revealing an ongoing investigation of modernist clarity and geometric abstraction.
“There are a billion different idioms and genres and pictorial conditions that can be proposed as new editorial models or design elements in a reconstructive strategy. That to me is the bright future of painting in the 21st century. I’m focused on how painting re-designs itself, manipulates its characteristics, not as a naturalized extension of subjective pathos, but as a sequence of dispersed responses in light of new media and different entanglements. In that sense, these are models for a broader editorial proposition I’m only beginning to grasp.” -Andrew Falkowski