White Room: Graham Durward

White Columns is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by the New York-based, Scottish artist Graham Durward. This will be Durward’s first solo exhibition since 2001. Durward’s paintings incorporate (sometimes elusive) imagery sourced from history (inc. a series of works based on the “Turin Shroud”); art history (inc. hallucinatory re-workings of iconic Edvard Munch images); music (inc. a memorable portrait of the maverick figure Vivien Stanshall); cinema (Pasolini is a recurring character); and the internet (often in the form of portraits of ‘anonymous’ youths, whose on-line identities have been ‘erased’ or obscured using low-tech digital tools.) For his White Room exhibition Durward presents a discrete group of five recent paintings including a cropped ‘portrait’ of Napoleon; a monochromatic painting based on a work by Matthias Gr¸newald; two portraits of anonymous youths; and a still-life painting that depicts burning incense and a pomegranate. Colliding idiosyncratic interests and imagery, Durward’s melancholic works oscillate between the private, psychological realm of ‘desire’, and the more public arenas of representation and identity.

Graham Durward lives and works in New York. His most recent solo exhibition was in 2001 at AC Projects, New York. Previous solo shows include: Marianne Boesky, New York (1997); Patrick Callery, New York (1994); Shedhalle, Zurich (1993); Sandra Gering Gallery, New York (1992), amongst others. Group shows include: “20th Anniversary Show”, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York (2003); “Under Pressure”, Swiss Institute, New York (2000); “The Masculine Masquerade”, MIT List Center, Cambridge (1995); “The Use of Pleasure” (curated by Bob Nickas), Terrain, San Francisco (1994); amongst others. Duward previously exhibited at White Columns in 1990 in “Fragments, Parts, Wholes – The Body and Culture” (curated by Saul Ostrow.)