BOROUGH BAROQUE

Alyssa Klauer, Kelli Thompson, Matthew Uebbing, Tom Prinsell and Adam Linn
On view: March 25th – April 25th, 2021

5-50 Gallery is proud to present BOROUGH BAROQUE, a magical realistic group show including paintings by Alyssa Klauer, Kelli Thompson, Matthew Uebbing, Tom Prinsell and Adam Linn.

BOROUGH BAROQUE includes work by five emerging artists from New York City with one exception (Pittsburgh), who are mining the rich vein of contemporary realism. Seemingly taken from the world of fiction, their subjects range from the figure, still life, and landscape, always keeping an eye for the quandary of modern life. Included are the dangerously alluring faux worlds by Alyssa Klauer. Tom Prinsell's architectural fantasies, Adam Linn’s queer-themed cat-human character, Kelli Thompson’s jewel-like floral perfections. And Matthew Uebbing’s super smart take on urban predicament

Alyssa Klauer’s paintings are constructed on a foundation of visual effects–faux finishes, faux worlds, and phantasmagoric qualities–in an attempt to create a feeling of polyphony or mixed response, difference in sameness, repulsion in attraction. Employing the constructed still life to engage and pull together incongruent images to make an intense psychological space. The works are dangerously alluring, their propensity to transform rooted in their fragmentation. Klauer is interested in visceral metamorphic elements and how they combine to create autonomous feminine forms. The fragmentation heightens the artifice of the figures or constructions, and shows the body’s agency in reclaiming the artifice. 

Tom Prinsell’s paintings are stage sets for uncanny narratives, where architecture, mythology and curiosities collide. Informed by medieval art, the Renaissance, and Romanticism, these works are constructed in the guise of the digital age to explore the dimensions of an ancient future. The depictions of these imagined places are disrupted and labyrinthine. There are worlds within worlds, which disperse or come into sharp focus, gleaming and ornate. Psychological undercurrents manifest as strange characters and animals converse in ambiguous landscapes and dream territories.

Adam Linn’s work relates his own queerness to the abjective nature of anthropomorphism. Linn depicts a cat-human character performing quotidian functions and behaviors that mimic human life. This character grapples with themes of desire, seduction, isolation and technology as a way to highlight the specific anxieties that surround existence in a queer body. The cat figure embraces a harmonious coexistence of the feminine and the masculine by blurring the distinctions between genders. Additionally, the character serves as an avatar through which to pick apart the nuances of a queer identity largely formed by millennial era video games and the internet. In blending languages of cartooning and realism, Linn is able to render a space floating somewhere in between the real and the imaginary. This nebulous space references the digital realm, the origin of all his fascinations with the perverse world of anthropomorphic cartoons. The practice of drawing allows Linn to render these figures and spaces softly in layers, creating a specific texture that acts as both a filter and a window. Through exaggerating the bodily nature of space and material, Linn seeks to seduce the viewer into accepting an alternative look at the spaces we inhabit, the objects we love and the emotions we feel. 

Kelli Thompson’s work consists of figurative and geometric elements, tied together by a bright, synthetic color palette and smooth gradient. Her intention by merging these two styles of painting is to engage with formal painting in a way that combines mimicry of digital production and overly descriptive painted hyperrealism. Realistic subjects are re-imagined as artifice. Thompson uses an exaggerated painting style and artificially vibrant color palette to create an unnatural interpretation of flesh and objects. These objects are selected for their connection to her own memory or are connected directly to someone specific. Her intention is never realism, but some space one step beyond, a peek into their own obsession with a hyper focused, almost psychedelic way of seeing. Her paintings hold a lightness, an intentional lack of gravity - a floating strangeness and isolation. She aims to inspire awe in the pristine level of finish in these renderings, but is not trying to fool the viewer into thinking the objects are real. Thompson’s paintings only nod to reality while situating themselves firmly in an artificial space. 

The paintings Matthew Uebbing made in the past year are a reflection on this tense period in time. Between the studio, the apartment, and the remnants of a social life, the coronavirus pandemic transformed everyday existence into an anxious blur that slips in and out of focus. Any sense of feeling at ease is fleeting. In his practice Uebbing combines techniques and materials that are visually at odds with each other to create environments that seem confused or polarizing, both to the viewing audience and the beings that inhabit each work. Hoping that, by solidifying these stratified elements through representation, we will be able to use them as touchstones, and maybe find our way back home.

Download the Press Release, including image list, here.