Paul Housley

Paul Housley's magpie paintings adopt and often combine the iconic styles of past masters like Velazquez, Picasso, and Rembrandt. His intensely gestural paintings are not ironic appropriations, but troubled homages to art history's most celebrated geniuses. Although his paintings recall the glorified Gods of painting, Housley opts for self-deprecating humor over grandiloquence. Modest in scale, his expressive paintings often feature un-heroic subjects like toy figurines, cats, and stuffed animals. His portraits portray ambiguous, blurred out faces. They do not represent particular people as much as tropes handed down throughout the history of painting. Housley has shown across Europe and in the United Kingdom. He has had solo exhibitions at ZieherSmith in New York, Sunday Gallery in New York, Belmacz in London, Monte Clark Gallery in Vancouver and Bianca arte Contemporanea in Palermo.