Justin Craun

Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Justin Craun. In Perfect Strangers, Craun creates uncanny environments where receding form and vibratory color counteract familiar notions of painterly composition. His dragged surfaces give a plastic nod to gestural figuration while his abstract grounds appear kinetic. The show will include eight paintings.

Craun continues his singular and arresting examination of contemporary portraiture. The inhabitants stand, jump, swing and pose frozen in their environment as it swirls and spills around them. The formal qualities of the work create a compressed spatial depth that expands and collapses in a thick, unrelenting miasma of non-systematic patterning and disintegrated form. Underneath this jovial behavior, Craun delineates a sense

of loss and alienation that preoccupies each figure. Their faces, like masks, hold torrid expressions of enraptured joy, inward grief, outward threat, and spontaneous peace. Utilizing a hyperactive color palate, Craun addresses both the trauma and celebration of the decidedly American phenomena of sunny days and sick children.

About the Artist
Justin Craun (born 1982) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He has had solo exhibitions at Franklin Art Works, Minneapolis; One in the Other, London; and Fredericks & Freiser, New York. Earlier this year he was included in The Incomplete at Chelsea Art Museum, curated by Hubert Neumann. He will be included in the upcoming show, Unreal: Altered Perspectives in Painting at Saatchi Gallery, London. This will be the artist's second solo exhibition in New York.

Perfect Strangers

May 1 – June 14, 2008

Press Release