Spencer Sweeney Biography

Sweeney's versatile practice as an artist, DJ, and musician encompasses performance, self-portrait, painting, and collage, as well as immersive multi-media and participatory environments. Defying the boundaries of genre, medium, and exhibition display, Sweeney's work takes influence from jazz, popular culture, and art history to examine contemporary experience.

In 1997, Spencer Sweeney graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and moved to New York, where he quickly became a regular fixture in the city's underground art and music scene. Alongside his visual practice, Sweeney worked as a DJ; performed as the drummer in the noise-art group Actress (1997–2001), which he founded with Gang Gang Dance's Lizzi Bougatsos; and opened the nightclub Santos Party House with partners Andrew W. K. and Larry Golden in 2008.

Public performance and engagement

Performance and experimentalism are among the core aspects of Spencer Sweeney's practice. In 2010, his solo exhibitions Teatr Laboratorium at VeneKlasen/Werner, Berlin, and Egyptian Diving Board II at Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York, saw the artist transform the gallery space into a studio, laboratory, workshop, and stage. At the same time as confounding the traditional notion of the gallery as a space for passive spectatorship, Sweeney brought the otherwise private sphere of the artist's studio into the public.

Spencer Sweeney's engagement with the public, intended to dissolve the distinction between the amateur and professional, also gave rise to Headz (2017–2018): an open art studio and jazz stage he conceived with Swiss artist Urs Fischer.

Painting

In his painting, Spencer Sweeney centres the human figure, creating work that ranges from the rigidly geometric to the free-flowing and gestural. Many of his works are also self-referential, activating the concept of 'availablism'—a term coined by American performance artist Kembra Pfahler to describe the process of working with materials immediately at hand. For Sweeney, the image of his self is his most readily available resource.

In his self-portraits, Spencer Sweeney depicts himself with deliberate ambiguity, preferring to capture passing moments and emotional states over mimetic likeness. In Pregnant Woman on Horseback (2010), the frock-clad artist appears to be pregnant. Reflecting the variety of his stylistic expression, Sweeney's facial features are rendered true to form in the blue-hued Hair of the Dog, while they are reduced to a simplified schema of curvaceous lines in Sensual Shade (both 2018).

In Queue, his 2021 solo exhibition at Gagosian, London, Spencer Sweeney closes in on the human face. In the larger-than-life paintings, facial features are broken down in a variety of expressive styles; Sweeney switches between the bold, geometric shapes of works such as Carnival Mask and the gestural lines of thick impasto in works like Abraham the Poet (both 2020). Hung closely together to replicate the experience of coming face-to-face with a group of strangers, the paintings are positioned so that they can be seen through the gallery's windows, enabling a socially distanced experience of a pre-pandemic phenomenon.

Spencer Sweeney Exhibitions

Spencer Sweeney solo exhibitions include: Tennis Elbow: Spencer Sweeney, Journal Gallery, New York (2020); The Pastels, The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2019); Spencer Sweeney: Self-Portraits, Gagosian Park & 75, New York (2018); Viva Las Vegas, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin (2017); Spencer Sweeney, KARMA, New York (2015); Wake Up and Make Love, Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York (2015); SHE, C L E A R I N G, Brussels (2014); and Berlin Paintings, VeneKlasen/Werner, Berlin (2013).

Spencer Sweeney group exhibitions include: Different Strokes, Almine Rech, London (2021); The Conditions of Being Art: Pat Hearn Gallery and American Fine Arts Co. (1983–2004), Hessel Museum of Art, New York (2018); Painters' Painters: Gifts from Alex Katz, High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2014).

Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2021