André Breton's Collection at Centre Georges Pompidou, photo by Munro Galloway
Munro Galloway,
Belief System
Sept 14th - Oct 19, 2014
Opening Reception: Sunday, September 14, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Soloway is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings, drawings and artist books by Munro Galloway. In Belief System, Galloway employs a range of media to explore art-making as a practice of subjecting materials, images and ideas to a set of ordered terms and actions, which when repeated, can produce a kind of belief or faith in the object presence of the work.
Recalling the daily ritual of tantric painting, the experimentation of Josef Albers's color tests, the vibrating density of Richard Poussette-Dart's symbolic abstractions, and Morris Graves's transformation of everyday objects into talismanic forms, these are paintings that proceed additively, revealing themselves slowly over time. As a group, the paintings, drawings and books evoke the encounter between art and life evident in André Breton's collection of art and objects in his writing studio, a display synchronized not by form or function but by Breton's beliefs: in dreams, the unconscious, the occult, animism, magic and the laws of chance.
Acrylic and oil paint, inkjet printing, and on-demand publishing interact with artifacts of ordinary life—take-out menus, flyers and brochures—to achieve layered effects of color, shape, pattern and text, as digital imaging and traditional painting techniques merge to form a unified picture plane. The canvases bear the traces of instructions, dimensions, and lists of materials that tell the story of their making.
For this installation Munro Galloway collaborated with artist James Miller to build a wall display for the books and drawings and a low shelf for the paintings—making visible the condition of the artworks as objects in space, as bodies that respond to viewing bodies.
Munro Galloway lives in New Haven, CT. He has exhibited in the United States and Europe, including solo exhibitions at Murray Guy gallery in New York and The Ohio State University gallery. He is a Lecturer and the Graduate Coordinator of Painting and Printmaking at Yale University. He received an MFA in Painting from Bard College and a BA in Art Semiotics from Brown University.