Keegan McHargue

Topical

September 10 through October 10, 2015

Opening reception: Thursday, September 10 from 6 to 8 pm

Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Keegan McHargue.  In Topical, McHargue returns to the human figure, albeit broadly shaped, satirical versions. Though their expressions and gestures are generalized, McHargue defines them in surprisingly specific ways. A woman’s lower torso is a single grotesque foot. A butterfly with human legs drifts in outer space. An artist paints the landscape wearing a Colonial hairdo sporting the body of a Centaur. The topographies are identifiable yet seem as intuitive as the figures.

In an essay on the artist, Ross Simonini writes “ McHargue compresses and reduces and distills the image until it functions, like an icon, on the simplest, most unfettered visual wavelength. He thinks about the freedom inherent in minimalism while he works. It keeps his attention focused on the singularity of the idea, so that the image's energy appears to emerge from a point somewhere deep within itself and ripple outward into a sea of visual ideas, each one nestled into its neighbor, like a liquid puzzle. The feeling of looking is not dissimilar from seeing ancient Islamic and Hindu art, where narrative and space and subject flow into a single current.”