SPENCER SWEENEY : NUDES - Exhibitions

After the opening on July 9th from 10 to close Club Nutz at the Uptowner (Corner of Humbolt and Center) with guest DJs Spencer Sweeney & Richard Richard.

Milwaukee, WI - Beginning July 9th The Green Gallery will show a new series of paintings by New York based artist Spencer Sweeney (CV). Sweeney assumes the roles of artist, club owner, and musician to build a practice that falls intentionally between the cracks of any qualifiable genre. His explosively colorful collaged paintings and cartoonish drawings constitute one part of a larger body of work based on his persona. This places him within a tradition of artists, such as Martin Kippenberger and Francis Picabia, who, in cultivating outrageous personalities and shifting rapidly between artistic styles, sought an expanded room to maneuver not otherwise afforded by the gallery system.

Sweeney's new series at The Green Gallery are large scale black and white acrylic paintings on linen. Sweeney applies the paint with a brush to build silhouetted forms then adds detail by scratching into the wet paint with his fingers. The result produces a gestural distortion of the human form harking to styles of Matisse and Picasso. Themes include pizza god, soccer fan, nude figure and others.

Spencer Sweeney was born in Philadelphia in 1973 and is currently living in New York. Recent exhibitions include Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York; The Modern Institute, Glasgow; Teatr Laboratorium, Berlin; and Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco. Sweeney was included in "That Was Then...This Is Now" at PS1 Contemporary Art Center in 2008, and he participated in "Day for Night", the 2006 Whitney Biennial.