Danese/Corey is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings by Andy Piedilato. Inspired by a friend’s foray into boat building, this new body of work exposes the strange, violent beauty of shipwrecks in a wrathful sea.
Previous paintings, more resolutely abstract, concerned forms that resemble…rolling tectonic plates colliding and slipping past one another in indeterminate space. The arrival of this new theme suggests a more recent willingness to incorporate human narrative. In fact, one can easily read mast as bone, rope as tendon and sail as flesh.[1]
These large, imposing paintings recall Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, Copley’s Watson and the Shark, and Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream. A timeless fascination with the tempestuous ocean and imminent disaster, along with a dialogue between epic narrative and abstraction, envelops Piedilato’s storm-tossed, dismasted, rudderless ships in chaotic, roiling waters.
Working in a mixture of commercial house paint and alkyd medium to create a multi-layered surface, the artist combines bold color and grand scale, employing a geometry that obfuscates meaning even as it seems to describe the workings of a complex system. Here we have neither sense of scale nor geographic reference to reveal the gravity of damage or the distance from shore.[2]
Andy Piedilato is a Brooklyn based artist. Born in Athens, GA, he currently lives and works in Bushwick. He is the recipient of the 2015 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award in Painting honoring “a young American painter of distinction.” He also received the George Segal Grant in 2005, and was nominated for the Lambent Fellowship in 2006. Piedilato received his MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute, NY, and has a BFA in Painting from the University of Georgia.
A fully illustrated catalogue is available.
For further information please contact the gallery at 212-223-2227 or contact@danese.com
@DaneseCorey