Mari Eastman: In the Project Room: Fan Art

Mari Eastman 

Fan Art

March 21 – April 20, 2024

Broadway is pleased to announce Fan Art, an exhibition of new oil paintings by Chicago-based artist Mari Eastman. Working in small scale on panel and canvas, Eastman has created a sequence of appropriated portraits, still-life fragments, and depictions of animals that, taken together, begin to accumulate a curious momentum and meaning.

From the swift, direct copy—as in her homage to Lynette Yiadom Boake’s A Whistle in a Wish—to a startling depiction of a crouching wolf made from a nature photograph, Eastman infuses both drama and care into her surfaces. There is a poignance here as well, and Eastman’s mysterious and deceptively casual approach to painting is, in fact, carefully considered—her brushstrokes steadily accreting force and gravity.

Elsewhere, loving depictions of wild mustangs hang in accord alongside the arcing stem of a flower plucked from fellow Chicagoan Gertrude Abercrombie, and the famously dour grace of 1980s runway model Katoucha Niane. Each of these works takes up the thread of a broader narrative that weaves the intensely personal to broader cultural concerns. Eastman aims straight for the heart, and big questions about freedom, beauty, and control inhabit her compositions belying their diminutive stature.

Upon entering the Project Room, a viewer will trip a sensor activating a playlist of music selected by the artist featuring songs by Patrick Shiroishi, Amy Winehouse, Cibo Matto and Donna Summer. These tunes give clues to Eastman’s processes and preoccupations during the making of these works, and provide another spin to the “fan” of the exhibition’s title.