SETH EDENBAUM

Over the past ten years the artist has made figurative and abstract paintings, sculptures, photographs, stage sets and videos, alone and in collaboration with others. All of his works exhibit a playful formal rigor, and many hint at a narrative that is often, but not always, darkly funny.

This show will include a new edition of small black and white photographs, 14 Portraits of an Actor, recording an actor performing an assigned set of gestures between staged feelings and portraiture, hence the title, so that while they are stylised and ‘fake’ they also act as intimate images of a human being.

Also in this show will be a small and eccentric sculpture study in wire and string, The Raft; My Waterloo, a large collage of found photographs and iridescent cellophane; an an even larger painting, a diptych with a flat image of a running horse that manages to bridge the gap between a gracefully mannered abstraction and a not entirely ironic figuration.

The work is full of references without being swallowed by them. Whether commenting on American abstraction, pop art, theater and photography, or the abstract academic styles of Chinese landscape painting, it maintains its independence.

Free of dogma and consistent despite appearances; intellectual, witty and sensuous, SETH EDENBAUM’s work is some of the most inventive and complex now on view in New York.