Monya Rowe Gallery is fired up to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Bryan Rogers titled Woodland.
“Just prior to the pandemic, I moved to South Orange, NJ. I beloved the architecture and background, primarily the publish business office 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 existence of the neighborhood community. I was inspired by the mural’s official attributes, as nicely as the paradoxical tension and placidity of the gentlemen depicted. I preferred to do my personal get on determine and landscape portray, and applied Perlin’s mural as a scaffold of an thought to construct my possess planet.
“Currently being queer is intrinsic to my partnership to the globe, how I interact with other people today, and the do the job I make. My figures are an amalgam of center-aged queer guys with whom I’m most familiar/familial: myself, my brother, and my companion. The males in my paintings are nude. Their nudity returns them to an animalistic state. They are not predators — I assume of them as like deer transferring by means of the woods or goldfish in an aquarium. They never imagine about how silly and susceptible they could possibly be, and they remain this way as extensive as they preserve to their enclosures.” —Bryan Rogers, New Jersey, 2022
