I Was In The House When The House Burned Down
Ashley Bickerton
Steve DiBenedetto
Karen Kilimnik
Malcolm Morley
Thomas Trosch
Franz West
January 10 through February 28, 2004
Fredericks Freiser Gallery is pleased to present I Was in the House When the House Burned Down, an exhibition bringing together six artists whose works share a combustible mix of color, personal mythology, and psychic turbulence.
Across painting and large-scale collage, each artist generates a world in which fantasy, fear, humor, and desire sit uncomfortably close. The imagery often feels childlike or theatrical, yet the emotional charge is unmistakably adult: a kind of volatile innocence that pushes past any conventional idea of beauty or ugliness.
Franz West and Thomas Trosch locate this energy in a messy, exuberant materiality; Malcolm Morley and Karen Kilimnik offer storybook luminosity edged with menace; Ashley Bickerton and Steve DiBenedetto stage more antagonistic, frictional encounters between figure and ground, image and impulse. Together, the works trace a spectrum of emotional excess--from playful to feral--unified by a heightened, almost electric use of color.
Fredericks Freiser Gallery is located at 504 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm. For further information and/or photographs please contact the gallery by telephone at (212) 633-6555, fax at (212) 367-9502, or email fredericksfreiser@nyc.rr.com. Find more information on any of our artists at www.fredericksfreisergallery.com.