Autumn Ramsey
Park View/Paul Soto
22.4. – 3.5.2019
Opening reception
Monday April 22 from 6 to 8pm
Park View / Paul Soto, Brussels is pleased to present an exhibition by the Chicago-based painter Autumn Ramsey. This will be Ramsey’s first monographic exhibition in Belgium.
Ramsey’s practice addresses the construction of social identity and difference –specifically the cultural inclination to often look at the surface of things without consideration for what lies beyond that which is immediately seen. Her work plays with logic in a way that supports communicative language while also deeply subverting it. In both scenarios, she asks viewers to follow seemingly innocuous, even ridiculous signs into a realm of circumstances that challenge common beliefs and examine bias. In the process, she reveals the deeper character of her practice.
For much of Western history, the body, especially the female body, has been conceptualized as simply one more object among others, something that is part of the physical world but not entirely rational – a source of disruption that needs to be controlled. This social construction of difference correlates to ideas of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. Ramsey uses this to explore not only the role of the situation in shaping the individual, but also the individual’s role in shaping the situation.
Ramsey’s work has consistently addressed cultural and psychological issues, often framed by art historical and mythological analogies. This exhibition continues that query and may be seen as addressing transition in particular, in all of its complexity. From the image of impending change represented by White Raven, to the strident Big Cock, to Bouquet, and the sinuous and serpentine progress of the two Stripes, the combination of works offer a whiff of this cultural moment at the same time that it celebrates the sensual and fantastical body. Taken together, they are a pungent, at times poignant and even sweet framing of the elation and apprehension of change. While each painting is an expression itself, it is the collective space they occupy that is the subject of her exhibition. It embodies the way in which we define ourselves through a gamut of understandings that, taken together, begin to address the expression of a cultural moment, one that conveys ideas of desire, ambivalence, life lived and celebrated as well as a sense of it consuming itself, a laconic image of mortality.
Autumn Ramsey (American b. 1976) lives and works in Chicago. Recent exhibitions include: Chapter NY, New York; Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco; Galerie Crèvecoeur, Paris; Park View, Los Angeles; Kraupa Tuskany-Zeidler, Berlin; Mendes Wood DM, Brussels; Tanya Leighton hosted at Rob Tufnell, Cologne; Bodega, New York; Lyles & King, New York; What Pipeline, Detroit; Night Club, Chicago; Actual Size, Los Angeles; Julius Caesar, Chicago; The Green Gallery, Milwaukee; Southfirst Gallery, Brooklyn; and Rowley Kennerk Gallery, Chicago, among others. Ramsey‘s work will appear in the exhibition “Paint, also known as blood,” opening at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw in June.
