November 4 – December 23, 2016
FIERMAN is pleased to
present New York Underground, a solo exhibition by painter Jimmy
Wright. The show is comprised of works on paper from the 1970’s based on
Wright’s observation of and participation in the febrile world of gay sex
clubs, nightclubs, and bathhouses of the era.
Jimmy Wright moved to New York in 1974, following a period of graduate study at
the Art Institute of Chicago in which he engaged with the emergent group of
Chicago Imagist artists. His work from the Chicago period reflects his
upbringing in a religious family in Kentucky, with serene and mystical scenes
of baptisms and other non-Christian spiritual imagery. Upon arriving in
1970’s New York, he immersed himself with the same fervor in the thriving gay
scene of the period, frequenting the bathhouses, discos, and sex clubs that
flourished in that heady post-Stonewall pre-AIDS moment.
The drawings, done from direct observation and personal experience, evince a
sense of immediacy similar to that of Toulouse-Lautrec in fin de siècle Paris
or George Grosz in Weimar Germany. The technique is varied, with some
works in a sooty, smoky graphite, some quick and cheeky in pen and ink, and
others tenderly rendered in gouache and watercolor. The sex club drawings
are raw; the bathhouses romantic.
Wright stopped making this body of work as the AIDS crisis wracked the gay
community and New York changed. The extant drawings from the period as
such serve as a dreamlike document of an oft mythologized cultural moment.
Jimmy Wright was born in 1944 in Union City, TN and raised in rural
Kentucky. He has been living and working in New York since 1974. He has
shown consistently nationally and internationally, and is represented by
Corbett Vs. Dempsey (Chicago) and DC Moore (New York). His work is
concurrently on view in Olympia, organized by Karma NY, at
Galerie Patrick Seguin, Paris. In conjunction with this
exhibition FIERMAN is releasing a limited edition publication of
Wright’s tearoom drawings, featuring writing by Alissa Bennett and Alison
Gingeras, published by Heinzfeller Nileisist. In 2016 Corbett Vs. Dempsey
published a full color monograph of the New York Underground drawings.
Fierman
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