Randy Wray

Their Private Worlds Contained The Memory of a Painting that had Shapes as Reassuring as the Uncanny Footage of a Sonogram

Curated by Sedrick Chisom

Omari Douglin, Brook Hsu, Merlin James , Stanislava Kovalcikova, Kent O’Connor, Randy Wray, Hiroka Yamashita

Matthew Brown, Los Angeles, CA, January 8 – February 5, 2022

A good friend of mine once told me that the mark of a good painting show is that it makes you want to drop everything and run to the studio to paint. I have held onto this statement for several years wondering about what it is that makes painters obsess in this particular way. The reason I selected the artists in this show is ultimately very simple; in following the work of each painter included, I have found their responses to the concerns in painting that most haunt me to be such that it forces me to address these crucial questions in my own work. There is not an essential theme that governs my decision to curate this selection of artists but rather sympathies across painting practices and sets of overlapping formal, conceptual, and material affinities that put forward imaginations of painting. If anything unites the artists in this show I think it has to do with a certain kind of haptic, giddy, corny, old fashioned belief in the vitality of paint.

—Sedrick Chisom