Please join us on Friday, March 8th from 5-8PM for the opening reception for SHANE WALSH: NIGHTS AND WEEKENDS. This will be the third solo exhibition at The Alice Wilds by artist and educator Shane Walsh and we could not be more excited! Walsh’s last exhibition, COMBINATED ran during the start of the pandemic in 2020; don’t miss your chance to view this body of recent work. This exhibition will be on view through Saturday, April 20th, 2024 and will also be our featured exhibition for the spring installment of Gallery Night and Day, April 19th and 20th, 2024.
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Approaching painting as a form of collage, Shane Walsh playfully dissects then reconstructs visual languages to arrive at a form of abstract painting that is both autobiographical and historically aware. His omnivorous appetite for visual culture results in a wide array of references, quotations, techniques and materials that ultimately fuse into Frankenstein-like compositions, melded but never seamless. This cut and paste ethos is a direct result of his involvement in various subcultures of the 1990s.
Other influences like xeroxed zines, video game arcades, television motion graphics, and design elements from disco and early graffiti, combine with painterly and geometric Abstraction. He then redirects and choreographs this ensemble on the painting’s surface employing a variety of paint handling techniques and charged interactions. The transformed “whole” of these painterly elements destabilizes their component languages, and ultimately creates the grammar for a new one.
For Walsh, simply restating the terms of formal abstract painting is not a sufficient exercise in 2024, but by reshaping existing visual codes, he creates a customized, reinvented, individualized dialect of abstraction that is specific to his life experiences, relevant to his time and place.
Shane Walsh received his MFA from the University of Washington-Seattle and presently teaches painting and drawing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, splitting his time between his studios in Milwaukee and New York City. Represented by Asya Geisberg Gallery in New York and The Alice Wilds in Milwaukee, he has shown work in solo and group shows at galleries and museums in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Seattle and many others.
EVENTS:
Opening Reception: Friday, March 8th, 2024: 5-8PM
Gallery Night Reception: Friday, April 19th, 2024: 5-8PM
Gallery Talk: Saturday, April 20th, 2024: 1PM
Image: Shane Walsh, "Five Alive," 2023, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 16 x 12 inches.