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Foxy Production is pleased to present “Dandelion Song,” Srijon Chowdhury’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. In Chowdhury’s new oil paintings, flowers anchor visual narratives incorporating people, fantastic beings, insects, and still life objects. Dandelions, poppies, roses, and thistles, among many other flowers, take on an electrifying life of their own in scenes of sensuality, wistfulness, and expectation.

The artist mixes a range of painting styles and techniques, including a heightened realism, a subtle tonalism, areas of affective abstraction, and uncanny patterns. His paintings’ dynamic color themes are as symbolic and allusive as the subjects they picture. His pictorial spaces combine different perspectival views, from three dimensions to two, and between areas of clarity and opacity.

Chowdhury highlights the structural role of symbolism in figurative painting, while making a direct address to the viewer that feels visceral, emotional, and personal. He is concerned with the psychic resonances that motifs can generate. Using a lexicon of still life art – animals, flowers, fruit, and candles – his canvases capture a sharp yet sensuous tension between mystery and revelation, and between fear and hope.

Chowdhury refigures the world around us in emotive scenes that mine the history of representation. He combines both Realist and Symbolist tendencies in his application of a mythical overlay to domestic stories. Color, both vivid and muted, washes over his scenes to hypnotic effect; always in the foreground, color acts as a central protagonist in his work. He has said: “Color affects a person viscerally and quickly. I think about the chakras which begin with crimson that root us to this reality and this body.”

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

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: “Striving After Wind,” Chapter NY, New York, NY (2021); “Severed Symbol,” Deli Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; “Barely Furtive Pleasures,” Nir Altman, Munich, Germany (both 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.

• Press release, checklist & CV.
• Fujimori, Manami. "Gallery Hopping in Chinatown a.k.a. Two Bridges: Manhattan’s Hottest Art Area.” YomiTime. 25 June 2021: 4.
• White, Katie. "'Srijon Chowdhury: Dandelion Song’ at Foxy Production.” Artnet News. 15 June 2021. Web.
• Yin Zhang, Lisa. "Srijon Chowdhury." TheGuide. 14 June 2021. Web.
• "Srijon Chowdhury at Foxy Production." Contemporary Art Daily. 14 July 2021. Web.
• Chowdhury, Srijon. Flower Power: A Studio-Visit Conversation Between Paul Maziar & Srijon Chowdhury: In Conjunction with Dandelion Song. New York: Foxy Production; AC Books; 2021.