EXHIBITION IMAGES | PRESS RELEASE | ARTIST PAGE
HENRY GLAVIN – A GRID AND A SHADOW | June 3 – July 3 | East Hampton, NY
In his third exhibition with the gallery, Henry Glavin continues to render the realm of Man without men. In this series of ten new acrylic-on-panel paintings, ranging in scale from two-to-six feet, the young artist has broadened his already comprehensive painterly vocabulary by reproducing various man-made structures amid effulgent views of raking light and turbulent shadows.
But what Glavin so astutely interprets in this new suite of painstakingly assembled artworks is not simply “Architecture” as we commonly think of it: various styles of houses, barns, apartment buildings, and the like. Instead, Glavin’s output reads more like the inevitable maturation of conceptual artist Dan Graham’s oeuvre: a haunting elegy of America’s most deeply-rooted industrial logic, reaching back from its earliest wood-stacking methods and into today’s urban rows of multi-colored houses.
Despite the many pitfalls of industrialism, Glavin finds the delicacy in our nation’s insistent grids, units, and segments. Like the American Precisionist artists before him—Charles Scheeler and Ralston Crawford, to name a few—Glavin understands that he is, for better or worse, a descendant of these fanatical pragmatists, and he seeks to soften their provinces by insisting they include moments of play, color, and magic.
Even in his humblest paintings, such as Compost Bin With Weeds, 2023, Glavin offers viewers a dazzling requiem to our utilitarian dominion. Often considered a “hippie” affectation, the artist imbues the titular edifice with the organization of a sacred ziggurat and the crisp functionality of a well-oiled factory—qualities echoed in a swath of orderly wire fencing and, in the background, the hint of a stately Colonial. But within these regulated settings, Glavin always registers moments of fleeting sensorial beauty as his form of quiet protest. In the foreground, a medley of glowing green weeds gathers impudently around the central structure while gently lilting sunflowers and their waxy leaves, lit by the dwindling sunlight, interrupt the scene with a flash of wild amber.
The exactitude of Glavin’s process, his amplified colors, and a laser focus on repetition in his compositions saturate his subjects with an uncanny feeling of dissociation, proving he owns a healthy level of distrust in both beauty and order. Nonetheless, these paintings are ultimately about our hopelessly imperfect selves: people with unyielding ambition who find true meaning in accidental growth, fugitive light, and the transience of seasons, among other miraculous forces.
– Ryan Steadman
Delhi, NY, June, 2023
Henry Glavin was born in 1991 in New York City, NY, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He earned his MFA from Hunter College in New York City, NY, in 2023 and his BFA in Painting and Ceramics from Alfred University in Alfred, NY, in 2014, where he was granted the Outstanding BFA Thesis Award, The Daniel Joseph Murphy II Memorial Award, and the Fred H. Wertz Award for writing. Glavin received a St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award as well as a Vermont Studio Center residency. His work was included in the exhibition In My Room: Artists Paint the Interior 1950-Now at The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA. A Grid and A Shadow is Glavin’s third solo exhibition with Halsey McKay Gallery.