Jeremy Lawson, Sister, 2022, oil on canvas, 72 x 96 inches

Jeremy Lawson
Compound

August 20 — October 9, 2022
Opens Saturday, August 20, 6–8pm

Harper’s East Hampton
87 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY 11937
Daily, 10am–6pm

Harper’s is pleased to announce Compound, New York-based artist Jeremy Lawson’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery. Presenting new oil paintings on canvas at the East Hampton location, Compound highlights Lawson’s process-oriented, brushless approach toward gestural abstraction. The exhibition opens on Saturday, August 20, 6–8pm, with a reception attended by the artist. 

Simultaneously defined as a union of two or more elements and a contained area, the title Compound captures Lawson’s complex relationship with the act of painting. The variegated surfaces of his work are obsessively covered by blotches, smears, and clumps of pigment in a roughshod manner, including all four sides of the stretcher bars. No quadrant is devoid of intense color, and layers are built up recursively to expose the artist’s numerous attempts to arrive at a final composition. Treating each piece as if it has commanding powers over his decision-making, Lawson wrestles with recalcitrant materials in order to discover the painting’s aesthetic resolution. Often failing in the early stages—and at times failing altogether—he dutifully starts anew if he suspects that his own hand has become overly dominant. Whenever these moments occur, he must “break the piece and rework it for the painting to come into its own,” as Lawson himself puts it. Such an aggressive technique is both a protest and an adaptation to the authority of the artwork over personal caprices. For Lawson, to be in unison with the medium is to develop a homeostatic relationship with it, which entails casting aside his own predeterminations and responding to the needs of his paintings as self-contained subjects.

While such a demanding process harkens back to the heroic mythos of his Abstract Expressionist predecessors, Lawson undercuts this heralded statue by painting directly with his hands. Nothing but a thin leaf of palette paper separates his fingers from the canvas as he smudges daubs of paint across the picture plane. Although this rudimentary procedure appears more intimate and tactile, it paradoxically reduces his control and sense of connection. The clumsy motion of holding wet pigment on thin, waxy paper severely limits fine-tuned movements, forcing him to make imprecise strokes and amorphous shapes. Eschewing brushes or tools, Lawson deskills his painterly method and blunts the presence of his own signature style. In this aspect of his work, he does not evoke the archetype of the master painter, but that of a child, playful and disobedient, who smears their dirty hands on any surface available. Even though Lawson’s approach to painting might recall past art forms—the unconscious transference of Surrealist automatism, the immediacy of gestural abstraction, the untrained rawness of Art Brut—he breathes new life into these conventions by tearing them down for a fresh beginning. Each piece on view in Compound is an exercise in realizing the power behind this mode of creative destruction. 

Jeremy Lawson (b. 1980, Warren, PA) received a BFA from Syracuse University in 2003 and an MFA from Hunter College in 2021. Most recently, his work has been exhibited at CFHILL, Stockholm (2022); Hauser & Wirth, New York (2021); studio e gallery, Seattle (2021); and Kristen Lorello, New York (2019). Lawson currently lives and works in New York City.

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Detail: Jeremy Lawson, Sister, 2022

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