COURTESY CANADA
Next up at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, Connecticut, will be a group show organized by the artist Sadie Laska with the title “Animal Farm,” a name perfectly in tune with these Orwellian times. “Artists in the exhibition will include pop icons Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf alongside younger contemporary artists whose work speaks to the state of current politics,” a news release from the institution says.
The exhibition runs May 14 through September at the museum, which was started by Peter Brant, the owner of the parent company of these pages, and will also feature artists like Joe Bradley, Sarah Braman, and Joyce Pensato. It is a rare group outing for an institution that has typically focused on one-person affairs.
Laska has penned a statement for the show, which follows below:
You feel a swamp. The world flattened, spun faster, capsized, and now a frog king. It’s ok to laugh. We’ve been here before.
Animal Farm is a show of works revolving around this sense of spiritual dislocation and eternal return. Since the advent of print displaced its representational function, fine art has existed as a history of perverted exchanges between subcultures and mass media. Mickey becomes Andy; Andy becomes a bright t-shirt. A selection of works by Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Katherine Bernhardt, Tyson Reeder, Joe Bradley, Chris Martin, Sarah Braman and many others sketch a story that slides from figurative iconography to totemic abstraction, charting a world in churn; in print, in space, and on canvas. Animal Farm reminds us that color is as material as culture, and that fantasy has long been a way to resist: identity, oppression, boredom. Freak out, or don’t.
After that, a Jason Rhoades show will arrive at the museum, running November 2017 through March 2018.