Opening Reception: Friday, February 9th, 6-8pm

Auxier Kline is pleased to present a solo exhibition by the artist Stephen Gay, On the Ropes, featuring a survey of new paintings created by the Brooklyn based artist over the past year.

Stephen Gay’s paintings sit in the tension created by contradictions. Forgoing simple reads, they ask the viewer to linger in their sensations and hold onto opposing truths. A single painting can be violent and beautiful, gestural and tender, figurative and abstract. Gay uses the messy, tactile qualities of the medium to turn the paintings into archives of movements that respond and collide with each other, recording the artist’s lived experience.

In this body of work, Stephen Gay grapples with the fact that stories of masculinity are often stories of violence.

“As a child, I was rewarded for being athletic and competitive, but was never taught how to bring beauty into the world or how to find it in others. I was taught that a man’s role is to provide and protect, but today I do not know who needs my provision and from what they need to be protected. When I ask what a man should be, the answers either come from angry reactionaries or from those who believe that the idea of masculinity is irredeemably toxic. I am unable to find myself in that conversation.”

In these new paintings, Gay draws on imagery from contemporary boxing matches, exploring the male body and its capacity to be both violent and beautiful. By engaging his own body in the painting process, the act of painting becomes a fight as layers of paint are added and scraped away. Ultimately, these paintings represent a search for self and a hope that we can be many things at once.