Magenta PlainsDallas Art Fair Projects 2020

Magenta Plains is delighted to present works by three New York-based gallery artists at Dallas Art Fair Projects: Nathaniel Robinson, Don Dudley, and Zach Bruder.

NATHANIEL ROBINSON Derived from photographs and subdued in color, Nathaniel Robinson’s paintings comment on the intermixing of natural and built worlds in an unplanned way and the physical shattering of ecosystems while presenting a picture of quotidian serenity. Robinson expresses the controlled landscape or accidental still life through a poetic vernacular, expressing a deep ambivalence toward the limits of human perception and functioning as a metaphor for the ambiguous experiences of everyday life. In 2015, The New York Times described Robinson as a “remarkably inventive sculptor [making] technically impressive, philosophically provocative works that play in the gap between perception and cognition — between what you see and what you understand.” While primarily known for his sculptures and installations, Robinson's new paintings merge realism with abstraction, to suggest urban or natural landscapes and environments. In an Artforum review of his first painting exhibition in 2019, Michelle Grabner wrote, "Robinson withholds the details that make things unremarkable and exaggerates the abstract qualities that build a compelling image...as with his sculptures, we find ourselves taking a second look at what is in plain sight." Nathaniel Robinson received his BA from Amherst College in 2002 and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005. Robinson has held solo exhibitions at Magenta Plains, New York, NY; Feature, Inc., New York, NY; Devening Projects, Chicago, IL; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL. Robinson has also been included in group exhibitions at the American Academy of Arts & Letters, New York, NY; White Columns, New York, NY; Martos, New York, NY; Thomas Park Gallery in New York, NY; Maerzgalerie, Leipzig; dok25a, Dusseldorf; and TCB art inc, Melbourne. Robinson is a recipient of the American Academy of Arts & Letters 2019 Art Purchase Award and his work has been written about in publications such as The New York Times, New York Magazine, Artforum, and Art in America. The artist lives and works in Brewster, NY.

DON DUDLEY The new paintings on paper by 90-year-old New York-based painter Don Dudley represent his ongoing fascination with space and form as well as his career-long dedication to developing ideas on paper as a cornerstone of his practice. The new works expand on Dudley's unusual merging of West Coast Minimalist sensibilities while also engaging in East Coast Minimalism's modular rigor. Dudley’s phenomenological approach to his work emphasizes atmosphere, affect, and pure visual experience while seeking to channel the sublime and expressing the richest variety of visual phenomena by the simplest means possible. Born in Los Angeles, CA in 1930, Don Dudley’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions including MoMA PS1 Contemporary Art Center (1982) and New Museum of Contemporary Art (1984) in New York, NY. Throughout his seventy-year career, Don Dudley has challenged artistic conventions and the traditional concept of painting by incorporating industrial materials in his work such as aluminum, lacquer, homasote and plywood, creating subtle and sophisticated wall works that stand out for both their elegance and formal intelligence. Dudley’s first solo presentation was at New Gallery in Houston, TX. Subsequent solo shows were held at La Jolla Museum of Art, La Jolla, CA; I Gallery, La Jolla, CA; John Doyle Gallery, Paris, FR; Galerie Alfred Schmela, Düsseldorf, DE; Galerie Farideh Cadot, Paris, FR; Art, Design & Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara, CA ; Pam Adler Gallery, New York, NY; I-20 Gallery, New York, NY; Mendes Wood, Sao Paulo, BR; Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne, DE; and Magenta Plains, New York, NY. Select group exhibitions at major institutions include “Contemporary American Painting” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; “Double Take” at New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY; ”Corners” at Vera List Art Center at MIT, Boston, MA; “Activated Walls” at the Queens Museum of Art, New York, NY; TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art, Dallas, TX; Annual Contemporary Art Auction, Dallas, TX and most recently, “Between Two Worlds: Art of California" at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA. Dudley lives and works in New York, NY and Kerhonskon, NY.

ZACH BRUDER Zach Bruder's paintings explore confrontations with the past as a means to interpret the ever-changing present. Bruder captures images on canvas which seem to float in the collective unconscious. Visually and compositionally harmonious, his paintings conflate divergent pictorial influences from advertisements, caricatures, cartoons, art history, and photos from his extensive historical archive. Zach Bruder’s metaphorical approach to painting and long-term interest in image collecting results in inventive compositions in which both pictorial and illusionistic space play a role. Often humorous and allegorical, his paintings involve animals, architecture, and anthropomorphism. His canvases revive and repurpose familiar motifs, referencing folklore while finding new metaphors in simple objects and creatures. The source material—archetypal and drawing from classical and vernacular mythology—is culled from the artist’s extensive archive of historic imagery. Addressing mythologies both cultural and personal, Bruder’s paintings offer multiple interpretations of religious and social narratives and urgent responses to the societal and political moment in which they were produced. About his work, Valentina Di Liscia writes, “Faced with one of Bruder’s canvases, the viewer takes an active role, deciphering the intertextuality between the multiple literary, historical, and folkloric references he often cites simultaneously.” Zach Bruder received his BFA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Madison, WI. Bruder presented his first solo show at Magenta Plains in January 2018 in New York, NY and has an upcoming show at Magenta Plains in 2020. Solo exhibitions have also been held at Harlan Levey, Brussels, BE; galerie l’inlassable, Paris, FR; Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco, CA; and LaMaMa Galleria, New York, NY. Bruder has been included in group shows at Peter Freeman, New York, NY; Ratio 3, San Francisco, CA; The Journal Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Phillip Slein Gallery, St. Louis, MO; and Magenta Plains, New York, NY. The artist lives and works in New York, NY.

GALLERY BIO Founded in 2016, Magenta Plains is a contemporary art gallery located in the Lower East Side of New York City directed by Dallas native Olivia Smith, Chris Dorland and David Deutsch. The core mission of the gallery is to bring greater attention to artists regardless of age or career and to provide historical context and meaning for the development of new ideas while preserving older generations of artists' work. The gallery participates in fairs such as Independent NY, Frieze NY, NADA Miami, and has mounted over forty-five exhibitions to date, and formally represents twelve artists whose ages span over 60 years between them. Exhibitions have been reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum, The New Yorker, Art In America, Forbes, The New York Observer, Artnews, Artinfo, Artnet, and more.

  • LocationNew York, NY
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