ART CITIES:N.York-Spencer Sweeney

Often referred to as a Downtown Renaissance man, Spencer Sweeney’s ever-shifting and versatile practice moves across genres and styles within visual art, music and performance. Rooted in a variety of methodologies and reciprocity of influences in his roles of artist, musician, club owner and DJ, most of Sweeney’s work is based on his persona and the potentials of public exposure.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive

Ever challenging the traditional norms of a gallery space while transcending its system, Spencer Sweeney’s multifaceted approach has made Sweeney’s work prominent, since his emergence in the New York art and music scene in the late 1990s. Spencer Sweeney presents new painting in his solo exhibition “Self-Portraits” that is on presentation at Gagosian. Self-portraiture, which Sweeney has equated to “Working as your own analyst” has been a persistent genre within his work. In both abstract and figurative modes, he weaves between recognizable human consciousness and expression. While Sweeney paints himself from photographs and mirrors, other personalities and influences of indeterminate gender and style begin to pervade his self-depictions. The artist appears as a social creature, subject to the influence of others, as well as to the forces of environment and lifestyle. The imagery of these new works jumps between different styles with an irreverent resistance to strict categorization. As musician and performance artist, Spencer Sweeney was a member of the seminal noise-art group Actress. As a painter and visual artist, he makes collages, paintings, self-portraits, and drawings, as well as environments and immersive experiences. This new group of works comes right after “Headz”, his collaboration with Urs Fischer on a temporary, underground, word-of-mouth art studio in Lower Manhattan, where artists (both known and amateur; adults, students, teenagers) came together to make pictures of human heads, resulting in a collage-like portrait of a specific time and place. “Headz” also became a hub for improvisational jazz, and hosted performances by Lonnie Plaxico, Jay Rodriguez, Craig Harris, and Pheeroan akLaff. Sweeney’s engagement with “availablism”, a term coined by performance artist Kembra Pfahler to describe making art using what’s around you, pervades his portraiture as if psychological territory is being physically mapped onto the canvas. His ludic and anarchic self-portraits show a multiplicity of selves, interwoven with an examination of the creative process itself.

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 821 Park Avenue, New York, Duration: 9/11-22/12/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10”00-18:00, https://gagosian.com