Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Austin Eddy: A Place For Dreams, an exhibition of recent paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Austin Eddy. This show marks Eddy’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view July 8 through August 13, 2021. The gallery will host an opening reception for the artist on Thursday, July 8 from 5:00 to 7:00pm.
Austin Eddy explores the formal concerns of shape, light, color, and collage while embracing the complex and broad spectrum of human emotion in his semi-autobiographical paintings. The artist created this new body of work as stringent quarantine orders began to lift and the world drastically changed once more. The sentiments bound up in Eddy’s vivid paintings reflect this unfamiliar time…from solitude and anxiety to romance and harmony to tension and tragedy. Birds, which sprawl across each of the artist’s canvases, are the driving subject matter and motif for these conflicting sensations. Eddy presents his birds as a way to understand the strain engrossed in the human experience—whether we are caged, soaring through the sky, or something in between.
Marrying a skewed perspective with dimensional flatness, Eddy’s paintings allude to the Cubist movement that defined the early twentieth century. The artist also offers up a delicate balance between figuration and abstraction, mirroring the real and unreal ways in which he renders lived experience. Moreover, his myriad mediums (including oil, flashe, colored pencil, pastel, and paper) further support these dichotomies as the image becomes simultaneously flattened and fractured by referencing painterly collage. Eddy explains, “the goal is to create a harmonious image through tension.”
Austin Eddy: A Place For Dreams features 13 new paintings that the artist has worked on over the past year. Eddy titles his works as carefully as he paints them, often incorporating poetic and musical allusions. These references act as a final medium to layer over his works. Eddy has considered Paul Verlaine’s 1872 poem “Tree Shadows” for this exhibition in particular:
The nightingale which, from the top of its branch, looks down into the river thinks it’s fallen in. It’s perched at the top of an oak-tree, and yet is scared it’s going to drown.
(Cyrano de Bergerac)
Tree-shadows in river mists
Die like smoke.
High in the air on real branches
Doves Lament.
Traveler, how often has this faded land
Watched you fade,
How poignant your abandoned hopes
High in trees!
Austin Eddy was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1986 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He earned his BFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010. Recent exhibitions include Seeuferweg at Livie Fine Art, Zurich, (2021), Light Reflecting Distance at The Pit, Los Angeles (2021), Birds At Night at Althuis Hofland Fine Arts, Amsterdam, (2020), Cold On The 4th Of July at Institute 193 B, New York, (2020), and The Poet And The Muse at Knust Kunz, Munich (2020).
Austin Eddy: A Place For Dreams, July 8 – August 13, 2021. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview are available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone (415) 781-4629 or by email info@berggruen.com.
