Auxier Kline is pleased to present our first solo exhibition by Dylan Hurwitz, Sand and Skin, featuring a survey of new paintings created by the Brooklyn based artist for this presentation.

The collection of paintings featured in Sand and Skin continue Hurwitz’s recent return to observational and plein air painting as a source for painting inspiration, in a celebration of queer and other public gathering spaces he has frequented. This body of work is the result of ongoing time spent in two locations: Boy Beach in Provincetown, MA, where he’s attended a residency the past four summers, as well as Jacob Riis Beach in New York City, a beach he bikes to regularly in the summer. 

Hurwitz paints from observation in these enclaves, and the resulting works oscillate between landscape, figure, and abstraction. The relative remoteness of both beaches is integral to the way they function as queer gathering spaces, and Hurwitz is interested in open-ended depictions of these spaces and people. Instead of comprehensive views of the interactions and groups of people at both beaches, he paints close up views of those he spends time with there, as well as the landscapes themselves that allow for gathering. His compositions are often cropped in ways that blur human forms and landscape, and which verge on abstraction. Segments of the depicted figures transform into undulating dunes, and body hairs take on the semblance of grass, intermingling with the landscape - a fluid interchange.

The on-site paintings additionally function as source material for larger works in the studio. Hurwitz works with scale shifts to further dissolve distinctions between the human form, landscape, and abstraction, as well as emphasize a playful push and pull between flatness and depth. The viewer is invited into the works through the use of first person perspective, and the motif of the pathway, while the use of cropping leaves questions about narratives unfolding beyond the paintings’ edges. These tendencies in his paintings raise questions around legibility and visibility