HORSEPLAY
October 12 - December 22, 2023
EBENEZER SINGH
Ebenezer Singh, Bucephalus 66" X 48", oil on linen
Rosebud Contemporary is proud to present Horseplay, an exhibition of paintings by Ebenezer Singh opening on October 12, 2023, at their Chelsea location: 526 W 26th St #606 New York, NY. This is the artists first solo show with the gallery. The Exhibition contains five new paintings from the artist showing the interplay of corporeal and conjectural play of horses as his self-images.
Horseplay: the word indicates rude, rowdy, or inappropriate play. The artist engages himself in the mischief inherent in this term, flouting audience expectation and anchoring us to his imagery. He announces a certain irreverence for boundary, for orthodoxy. The artist becomes a winking deity, taking on known challenges and relying on the imaginative to generate a metaphysical, moral reality. Singh’s horse is the intuitive, sensitive messenger that translates his image-ideas from the metaphysical world to ours. Bold lines, subtle tones and paint-heavy brushstrokes carve out the physical lineaments of these animals – a bridle, a leg, a hand cue, all exist at a delicious interface between the real and the fantastically unreal. The horse becomes his other half, his avatar, the Frou-Frou to his County Vronsky, the companion of the man whose death resembles the death of all he loves. Singh’s beasts thus play on his painterly desires, fancies, and fantasies. They then emerge, dappled and dense with story, onto his canvases.
The work ‘Bucephalus’, oil on linen, 66”X 48” has the reference to Alexander’s horse that stood with him in all his gallant battles from Greece to India. The skull under its lifted leg though it holds a psychological sensory nature to it, it poetically implies the might of myth and heroic tales. With his unique and cathartic rendering style, Singh layers and builds his canvas space with broad brush strokes only to leave out breathing spaces for the previously laid colors.
‘Horse Girl’ is a poetic take on Virginia Wolf’s quote “I believe we must have the sort of power over you that we’re said to have over horses”. The intellectual facility that the women have over men in the gender war of the world captivates the artist to whimsically combine the horse and a woman. From the bright yellow background, the horse girl looks at the viewer both quizzically and confidently with the cerebral prowess.
Remembrance of Things Past
July 13 - September 28
GRAHAM GILLMORE
STAN NARTEN
EBENEZER SINGH
Ebenezer Singh, Lick, 54"X38", oil on linen
Rosebud Contemporary is proud to present its inaugural summer exhibition ‘Remembrance of Things Past: Graham Gillmore, Stan Narten, Ebenezer Singh’ from July 13th until August 17th at their Chelsea location: 526 W 26th St #606 New York, NY 10001. Our opening reception will be held from 6 pm to 8 pm. The exhibition contains three new paintings from each of our artists. Every work reverberates with this theme: remembering pushes us forward. French author Marcel Proust got it right with the title of his most famous work: human nature is a study in ‘remembrance of things past’. Consider the stucco-grey American flags of Jasper Johns, or Cimabue’s golden crucifix hanging from a Florentine church nave. Art reveals that the symbols we traffic in depend on our collective memory of history. Our everyday structures, even the buildings holding us up and the flags fluttering outside our homes, are a result of collective memory. War blooms across the world in terrific variety. Battlefields look only slightly different. The Sonoran Desert at the US-Mexico border. Grimdark-grey fallout shelters in Odesa, Mariupol, Kyiv. The entire Mediterranean Sea. A planet’s past is being remembered, with untenable violence and displacement.
Everything in the past is always waiting, waiting to detonate, said architectural historian Vincent Scully. For these artists, the past detonates daily on their canvases, as it does outside their studio windows. We exorcise history every day by keeping things from the past, by remembering. Rosebud Contemporary’s exhibition ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ contains a body of work that reverberates with this theme. The artist’s lived experiences transfigure their canvas as an irrepressible ‘anima’. This anima is a proxy for Proust’s madeleine, in its ability to recall childhood memory through the inchoate prisms of adult post-modern experience. Everyone has a madeleine, that plain French biscuit that involuntarily summons a host of powerful childhood memories for Proust in ‘Remembrance of Things Past’. For Gillmore, the past is exorcised through the terse elegance of word-as-image. For Narten, there is a droll disillusionment in the motley memories of his urban life, even as potential light sources dance everywhere. For Singh, his anima occupies the female spirits of his life, those potent madeleines that conjure up memories of nature, sensuality and the supernatural. For all three artists, their present canvases tumble through memory and ford streams of remembrance. What we as viewers are left with, are gorgeous palimpsests of their collective past.