Shadow Work for Peonies

This show is a series of landscape paintings that progressively increase in scale throughout the gallery. Atop broken horizons, tornadoes contort and swirl in various stages of deconstruction and preformation to elicit fleeting images of dried flowers, herniated discs, and torpedoes of fire. Contrary to other series, there are no real cast shadows in any of these paintings. I like that this reinforces their overcast feeling and helps nudge the works towards a more conceptual place. These works were all produced from metaphysical premises, generated purely from my own sketches–a formal practice and an attempt to not produce overly sincere, wispy paintings. Eliciting and taming the movement of each painting became my focus. Erasure remains a critical part of my process, and that is especially true with these works where redaction becomes generative throughout the series. I was constructing images based on physics and then breaking down that stability. In this show, as in the last, scale is significant. I found a handling of a subject that works at nearly any scale. Each painting has a type of mark making and surface treatment that reaches a qualitative finish. With regards to their imagery, of flowers and landscapes, it's nice that they range from intimate to fully engrossing. In Jungian psychoanalysis, “shadow work” refers to the practice of encountering and integrating repressed and unconscious aspects of the self. In the context of these paintings, in their “shadow work” there is a balance of attraction and repulsion. I wanted to imply that objects of conventional beauty, like a flower, could propose multiple truths at once. —David Flaugher David Flaugher (b. 1986, Detroit, MI) lives and works in Berlin, Germany and New York, NY. Flaugher has had two solo exhibitions with the gallery (2022 and 2020), alongside recent solo exhibitions at Bernheim, Zurich, Switzerland (2024); James Cope Gallery, Dallas, TX (2022, 2020, 2018); and the Eli and Edythe Broad Museum (MSU Broad), East Lansing, MI (2021). He received his MFA from New York University, New York, NY (2013) and a BFA from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI (2008).