Refigured
By James Hyde
Description:
On cleaning out a dusty, overstuffed basement that housed dozens of my paintings, I excavated a number of surprises including a self-portrait from when I was sixteen. A large proportion of the pieces I found dated from the late '80s and early '90s when I was making paintings composed of multiple panels that engaged the physicality of architecture. There were a batch of miscellaneous panels from this period: some that I had never arranged into completed paintings and others which were part of complete works but whose documentation I have lost. Rather than dipose of the orphaned panels, I embarked on a project to recompose, reanimate and refigure them to become finished works.
Some panels required restoration; but otherwise I did not paint or modify them. Even though the units of these paintings are often related in material and proportion, each painting entails a unique set of panels. The idea was not to bring the panels into the sphere of the photographic and abstract work I'm doing now, but to compose them through the imagination of when they were made.
My paintings from this time were physical and concrete, even to the point of using concrete itself as panel and paint. So it's somewhat paradoxical to be presenting an exhibition of these works within the architecture of photography and the computer. Following is a presentation of twelve of these refigures pieces, interspered with work that was completed in the '80s and early '90s.
Details:
Digital: 23 pages
Published by James Hyde and Emmy Thelander, 2016
View online: http://www.jameshyde.com/THE_NEW/pages/exhibitions/2017/refigured/
