Upper East Side, New York
Group Exhibition
Tarantula's Babies in Their Flying Saucers!
David NolanTim Brawner Jonathan Meese Dennis Tyfus David Nolan Gallery is delighted to present Tarantula's Babies in Their Flying Saucers! an exhibition of recent drawings and paintings by Jonathan Meese, Dennis Tyfus, and Tim Brawner. Together, the three artists present a powerful engagement with culture, mythmaking, and the systemic forces that seek to control and manipulate those narratives. Their work is inscribed, to varying degrees, with the tradition of the grotesque and a fascination not only with the close proximity of desire and disgust, but also the increasingly confusing space between the real and an artificially generated reality. In their own inimitable and darkly comic way, each artist employs elements of the surreal, the fantastic, or the uncanny that speak to the current moment with an uneasy beauty. Born in Tokyo in 1970, Jonathan Meese moved to Hamburg in the mid-1970s; there, as a young teenager, he began drawing and making collages, influenced and enamored by the books, films, and television shows he voraciously consumed. Within Meese’s diverse and prolific oeuvre, painting is perhaps his most extensive and consistent practice, in which he translates his wild stage presence to a gestural velocity, favoring a maximalist, chaotic aesthetic and text that often jumbles German and English. Antwerp-based artist Dennis Tyfus issues a subtle critique of social convention and systems of power across drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation, as well as the music, performance, zines, tattoos, and ephemera associated with his record label and publishing house Ultra Eczema. In his drawing practice, Tyfus carefully plans each dream-like composition before executing it in graphite or colored pencil on paper. (His oil paintings are venues for more experimentation.) Like Meese, Tyfus is fond of the self-portrait, and he often appears as a character in surrealist situations: an insomniac haunted by apparitions of various fowl and a cat batting at sausage links; a solitary picnicker in a grassy field dotted with giant hams. Originally from Omaha, Nebraska, the Brooklyn-based artist Tim Brawner has a controlled approach, rendering his paintings and drawings with an exacting attention to detail and exquisite mark making. Drawing equally from an off-kilter pastoral setting and gilded interiors giving way to decay, Brawner’s work seems to teeter uncomfortably between a glamorous, mythical empire in decline and the feral, post-apocalyptic landscapes with all their hidden dangers that follow.