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Press Release

James Graham & Sons is pleased to present recent work by Joe Fyfe. The show will take place at 32 East 67th Street from February 5th through March 7th, 2009. A catalog with a poem by Max Blagg is available.

The untitled series of paintings--the focus of this exhibition--models itself on the devotional aspect of certain modernist works: Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross, Blinky Palermo's Times of Day and the films of Robert Bresson. The artist purchased the oxblood colored cloth in a Cambodian market. It evokes the robe color of Franciscan and Vietnamese monks. Equally important is Fyfe's linkage of this somber element to the history of French painting, to artists such as Chardin, Corot, and Cezanne. Yet Fyfe breaks with the past through the alternative of making the paintings with ordinary fabric.

Fyfe's photographs, several of which are in the exhibition, also allow extensions of concepts of painting. In the photograph entitled, Anuradhapura, Buddhist pennants are strung through the limbs of a Boddhi tree. For Fyfe the colored pennants are equivalent to paint and canvas while the tree represents the wooden stretcher.

As Fyfe writes, "Traveling to other countries expands ones color repertoire, other countries have different 'palettes' and use color differently. I access that palette by shopping in a given country's fabric markets and making my work with that colored material. Overall is the idea of the painting as a physical object that addresses the body as intently as it does the eye through an emphasis on its physicality…what better way than to utilize material that covers the body?"

In 2008 Fyfe was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in painting. In 2007 he was artist in residence at the Sitterwerk Zentrum für Kunst und Kulturwirtschaf, Switzerland. In 2006 he received a Fulbright Independent Research Fellowship spending 6 months in Vietnam and Cambodia. He is also a recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Award in 2005, 2 Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grants, and fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Yaddo and MacDowell colonies. Fyfe writes for Art in America, Artcritical.com, and Bomb among other publications.


For more information, please contact Priscilla Vail Caldwell or Cristine Chiasson at the gallery at 212-535-5767.

Selected Press

Joe Fyfe: Recent Work at James Graham & Sons, by Stephanie Bluhmann of artcritical.com
February 2009
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