Monya Rowe Gallery is energized to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Bryan Rogers titled Woodland.
“Just just before the pandemic, I moved to South Orange, NJ. I beloved the architecture and background, particularly the put up workplace and its’ WPA-commissioned mural [The Works Progress Administration was created by President Roosevelt in 1935, during one of the bleakest years of the Great Depression]. The mural’s painter was Bernard Perlin. Perlin’s tableaux was an idealized, symbolic slice of everyday living of the area neighborhood. I was inspired by the mural’s formal traits, as well as the paradoxical pressure and placidity of the males depicted. I needed to do my very own acquire on figure and landscape portray, and applied Perlin’s mural as a scaffold of an thought to build my individual globe.
“Currently being queer is intrinsic to my romance to the earth, how I interact with other people, and the do the job I make. My figures are an amalgam of middle-aged queer adult men with whom I’m most familiar/familial: myself, my brother, and my husband or wife. The men in my paintings are nude. Their nudity returns them to an animalistic state. They are not predators — I assume of them as like deer moving by the woods or goldfish in an aquarium. They do not feel about how foolish and susceptible they may well be, and they stay this way as very long as they keep to their enclosures.” —Bryan Rogers, New Jersey, 2022