Galerie Lisa Kandlhofer is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of James English Leary in Austria.

The paintings of James English Leary (*1982 Chicago, US) pit figuration against abstraction invoking metaphors that nurse (and satirize) camp-psychological states in the viewer. Rather than painting the paintings Leary constructs them out of painting’s component parts (stretcher, fabric, color, in that order) often employing a shaped substrate. The resulting image-objects and their buoyant overtures towards a language humorously engage the problematics of how to “read“ a painting and conjure the art experience as a slapstick rorschach, a drama of legibility, which hinges on the impossibility of making a shape that doesn’t eventually refer back to something of this world.

James English Leary is an artist and filmmaker living and toiling in New York City. Recent exhibitions have occurred at Galerie Leyendecker (Tenerife), Vito Schnabel Projects (NYC), Boyfriends (Chicago), SIM Galeria (Curitiba, Brazil) and SAFE Gallery (Brooklyn). Leary was a recipient of a 2015 Tiffany Foundation Award and was a resident of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Florida. He is an adjunct professor at The Cooper Union in New York City and a founding member of The Bruce High Quality Foundation and the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, a free arts university operating in New York City. The Foundation’s works have been included in Greater New York at MOMA Ps1, The 2010 Whitney Biennial and The Sundance Film Festival.

"I think when people talk about abstraction, what they mean is materials that only refer to themselves. I think abstraction is impossible actually - even paintings that we talk about as being abstract. You kind of project figuration on to if you are like me. If you look at a Jackson Pollock painting and you see like - you know - the hippies dancing in the rain. You kind of have to complete this representation yourself and you need to commit to some position within yourself about wanting a picture to refer to a body."