EXHIBITION IMAGES | WORKS | PRESS RELEASE | ARTIST PAGE
HALSEY MCKAY is thrilled to present Potpourri, Keegan McHargue’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
The medium of watercolor has long been associated with the summer months, when the heat drives artists out to paint en plein air, reversing the inward gaze of the studio practice out into the field. In Potpourri we find Keegan McHargue exploring this notion to bring us a suite of works that hover between Impressionism and Objectivism offering glimpses of the intrinsic mysticism of daily life.
The watercolors shown here not only recall McHargue’s large scale works on canvas, but find the artist expanding his polysemous universe, guided by the flow of the medium itself. The immediacy of the watercolor allows the artist to tap into a wellspring of ideas to render images with wildly inventive results: lush, tangled gardens with fountains cascading into mirror pools and citiscapes wrapped in a maze of arterial roadways ala the urban jungle—capturing the very essence of summer; a juxtaposition that most visitors to the gallery will find familiar especially during the summer exodus East.
Keegan McHargue was born in Portland, Oregon in 1982 and now lives and works in New York. He has had solo shows at Fredericks and Fresier, NY; Rivington Arms, NY; Metro Pictures, NY; Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco; Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris, and many others. Additionally, he has been featured in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Deitch Projects, NY; Yvon Lambert, Paris; and the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow. McHargue’s work is included in the collections of the Deste Foundation of Contemporary Art, Athens; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SF and the Museum of Modern Art, NY.