Foxy Production is pleased to present Srijon Chowdhury’s inaugural New York solo exhibition. His works recast themes from across the history of representational painting, from early Renaissance vanitas to German Expressionism and onwards. He subtly subverts the medium’s formalities—color, perspective, light, and surface—and its subjects—still life, nature, birth, death, the body. He gives unanticipated twists to traditional genres, including ancient myths, biblical stories, and family portraiture: contemporary life is historicized, gender expectations are upended, and familiar symbols and settings are reconfigured.

Like a vision of art history projected through a prism, Chowdhury’s work refracts received conventions of the “painting” and the “artist,” mixing fiction and autobiography, and past and present. The mural-sized Pale Rider reinterprets the Biblical story of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, presenting a ghostly woman and her steed galloping through a floral landscape, past a framework of letters that form William Blake’s poem A Divine Image. Narcissus pictures a contemplative woman in jeans, rather than the obsessive male youth of the Greek myth, peering into a dark pool that holds only the faintest hint of her reflection. Father and Son places parent and child outside, at night, bathed in an uncanny green moonlight. Flowers on Fire saturates a variety of flowers in the red-hot glow of a multiplicity of small fires, while An Old Dream pictures wilting flowers in a faint but sensual light next to a pair of scissors.

Srijon Chowdhury (Dhaka, Bangladesh, 1987) lives and works in Portland, OR, and Los Angeles, CA. He holds a BFA from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Minneapolis and Saint Paul, MN, and an MFA from the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA.

Solo exhibitions include: “Srijon Chowdhury,” Foxy Production, New York, NY (2020); “A Divine Dance,” Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA (2019); “Before Dreams,” Antoine Levi, Paris, France; “The Coldest Night,” Upfor, Portland, OR; and “Endings,” The Art Gym, Marylhurst, OR (all 2018). Selected group exhibitions include: “Barely Furtive Pleasures,” Nir Altman, Munich, Germany (2020); “Cicatrices,” VO Curations, London, UK; “Portraits,” Foxy Production, New York, NY (both 2019); “Swamp Thing vs Man Thing,” Et Al, San Fransisco, CA (2018); “February,” Roberta Pelan, Toronto, Canada; and “Water & Dreams,” The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI (both 2017).

CREDITS
Photography: Charles Benton.

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