Graham Durward at Step Sister. Opening Friday March 8th, 6-8 pm. Downstairs from Brennan & Griffin. 122 Norfolk Street
Step Sister is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by New York based artist Graham Durward. Durward’s works feature groups of beach goers, referencing the “bathers” trope found across art history. The scenes are interrupted by oversized fingerprints that distance the image and often obscure the identity of the figures. The fingerprint impression is at once both highly specific and ubiquitous, an identifying marker that has been turned into an abstraction, causing a shifting of scale in Durward’s tableaus. Richly painted in thick and thinned out oil, the swimmer’s physiques are built up, washed away or blurred in a constant flux of definition. This image is revisited in each painting, similar to how memory creates different narratives around identical facts. Durward’s own identity floats over his subjects, their anonymity kept intact by the artist’s “touch”.
Graham Durward lives and works in New York. Notable solo exhibitions include Shrine, New York, NY, 2016, Michael Steinberg, New York, NY, 2014, Louis B. James, New York, NY, 2012, Maureen Paley, London, UK, 2009 and White Columns, New York, NY, 2007. Recent group exhibitions include Exalted Position, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY, 2016 and Walter Robinson and Graham Durward, Kai Matsumiya, New York, NY, 2016.
