ART CITIES: N.York-Leidy Churchman
Leidy Churchman is a painter whose many subjects have included landscapes, advertisements, online videos, Tibetan Buddhism, nature photos, scientific diagrams, and even the work of other artists. In spite of this seeming all-inclusiveness, Churchman’s subjects are conspicuously personal, more like a browser history than an encyclopedia.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Matthew Marks Gallery Archive
Leidy Churchman has spoken of painting as part of a larger exploration of consciousness, a quest to expand what is knowable. One byproduct of this quest has been a redefinition of what is paintable. Churchman’s pursuit of the universal starts with the specific. The artist has said, “When we look up at the sky everything we see is the past and has already died a thousand, million, or billions of years ago. The paintings seem like this, a stage of things that have already happened but seem to be playing out in real time before us”. Featuring new paintings and monotypes, Leidy Churchman’s solo exhibition “New You” is his second with Matthew Marks Gallery, Churchman is well known for their wide-ranging subject matter, which draws variously from nature, contemporary media, everyday objects, as well as myriad cultural signs and symbols. The work, either representational or abstract, is informed by Churchman’s deep immersion in the traditions and philosophy of Buddhism. Whether painting the view from a trail in Maine’s Acadia National Park, or a small delicately-colored abstraction, the artist conceives of each painting in the exhibition as part of an interconnected body of work. The simultaneous presentation of seemingly disparate paintings is intended to encourage a deeper engagement with each work beyond its most immediate perception. “Eternal Life New You” (2021), which at over seventeen-feet across is among the artist’s largest paintings to date, depicts a rocky coastline with a rectangular black void at the center. Waterlilies float in salt water as an oversized grasshopper looks on from the margins and what appear to be parts of a robot-like skeleton intrude at the edge. The painting is an homage to both Monet and American landscape painting, while simultaneously evoking a computer desktop. Since beginning as an artist sometime around 2007, Leidy Churchman has painted, among other things, a painting by Marsden Hartley, a sculpture by Cameron Rowland, and the cover of the book “Of Human Bondage” by W. Somerset Maugham. He has taken paint to canvas and linen and wood and made versions of a pizza box, the Mastercard logo, and a Bauhaus boatbuilding kit. Other subjects include an awning from Rivington Street in New York and rugs from Tibet, ocean maps, medieval sketchbooks, feminist art catalogues, and a Reena Spaulings painting. A few of these things are three-dimensional, but most are flat, such as a photograph grabbed from the Internet of the tower. The first thing one notices about this list is its bewildering diversity. Then, to use a word that has shadowed art making for the past forty years or so, one sees the striking use of appropriation, even if Churchman’s work departs from the ideas and motives typically associated with this word
Photo: Leidy Churchman, Rousseau, 2015, Oil on linen, 66 × 84 inches; 168 × 213 cm, © Leidy Churchman, courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery
Info: Matthew Marks Gallery, 523 West 24th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 11/3-23/4/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://matthewmarks.com
