Exhibition features a series of new portraits, still lives, and a single landscape by Arcmanoro Niles
Arcmanoro Niles, I Miss The Boy I Once Had Time To Be (Last Night I Dreamed I Did The Things I Don't Do Now), 2020. Oil, acrylic, glitter on canvas, 36 x 54 x 1.5 inches. 91.4 x 137.2 x 3.81 cm. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London.
NEW YORK, NY
.-Lehmann Maupin is presenting Hey Tomorrow, Do You Have Some Room For Me: Failure Is A Part Of Being Alive, the gallerys first exhibition with New York-based painter Arcmanoro Niles. Featuring a series of new portraits, still lives, and a single landscape, this exhibition continues the artists critical investigation into the function and form of historically revered genres in painting. Niles is best known for his vivid, brightly-hued canvases that illustrate the seemingly mundane aspects of daily life―a man about to get into his car, a father and daughter sitting on their stoop with their dog, a woman waiting at a bus stop. His subjects are drawn from photographs of friends and relatives and from memories of his past, offering a highly personal record of contemporary life. The paintings, though autobiographical, engage with universal subjects of desire, hope, fear, and failure, while also recalling numerous art historical predecessors, including Italian and Dutch baroque, history painting, Color Field painting, and ancient Egyptian sculpture. For Hey Tomorrow, Niles has created a number of his distinct portraits, but the exhibition also features still lives and interiors that become surrogates for the figure―a cluttered bedside table, a urine test in a doctors office bathroom, or a kitchen table littered with liquor bottles and food containers.