Poppies
Keith Boadwee
March 6 - March 29, 2015
Opening reception: Friday, March 6, 6 - 8 pm
138 Eldridge Street, New York, NY 10002
Over the past three decades, Keith Boadwee has integrated photography, painting and performance in a prolific pursuit of the “pure joy of uninhibited expressive creativity coming from the place of radical queerness and sexual liberty.”¹ For his solo exhibition at Shoot The Lobster NY, on view from March 6 through the 29th, Boadwee presents a new series of paintings titled Poppies, which seamlessly line the walls of the gallery to create a lustrous panorama of bright cadmium red flowers.
Exploiting the standard vocabulary of painting—composition, line, color and figuration—Boadwee simultaneously pokes fun at the language of art history while paying homage to it. The works on view cull from a wide spectrum of this tradition, from the somatic brutality of Viennese Actionism to the primary simplicity of De Stijl. There is an ambiguity in the fabrication of these paintings hinting at past performances for which Boadwee first gained recognition in the 1990s. Often using his own body as tool, medium, surface or subject, each work obfuscates the artist’s engagement in his studio—they could stand as autonomous pictorial renderings or possible documentation of a transgressive action. The viewer is invited to draw his or her own conclusions.
¹ Nicole Eisenman, "Inside Out, Boy You Turn Me," Keith Boadwee 1989 - 2013 (Zurich: Micronaut and Hacienda Books, 2014): 30.