"Aaron Fowler: Tough Love" at Beeler Gallery (CCAD), Columbus, Ohio
June 13 - September 10, 2016
June 1, 2016
Diane Rosenstein is happy to announce that Aaron Fowler will receive a solo show at the Beeler Gallery, Columbus College of Art & Design in Columbus, Ohio. Aaron Fowler: Tough Love, a collection of large-scale assemblage pieces by the New York- and Los Angeles-based artist is on view from June 13 – Sept. 10, 2016.
In one of the most impactful moments in the exhibition, the young painter and assemblage artist — a St. Louis native — has composed a striking dual portrait of Ferguson shooting victim Michael Brown and his mother. The work is an altar-like, room-sized installation that uses paint, hair extensions, rope, found plywood and the eulogy that Lesley McSpadden, Michael Brown’s mother, wrote for her son.
Another work in the exhibition titled Family was recently featured in the group show A Constellation at the Studio Museum in Harlem, curated by Amanda Hunt. Family is an assemblage that uses various materials: Frosted Flakes, cotton balls, salt, wood, a player piano, acrylic, oil, blue jeans, leather, a bamboo earring, a red rag, a fan, CDs and Easter grass. It depicts the artist leading his family to the promised land but also refers to the ruptures of the black family under slavery, recently addressed by Ta-Nehisi Coates in an essay in The Atlantic called “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.”
Throughout the exhibition, the exuberant stylistic olio and outsider-infused spectacle of his hybrid, operatic tableaux rests on a bedrock foundation of advanced technique and obvious dedication to craft and method. His boundary-blurring, confident fluency in a range of urban and atelier vernacular modes of narrative, allegorical, depictive, expressive painting and sculpture, as well as bold architectural siting, yield an engaged, active scholarliness with shades of Noah Purifoy, Leon Golub, Barry McGee, Robert Rauschenberg and Romare Bearden.
ABOUT AARON FOWLER
Fowler was born in 1988 in St. Louis, Missouri. He received his BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2011 and his MFA from Yale University in 2014.
This year, he had a solo exhibition at Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Los Angeles. He was recently included in the group exhibition A Constellation at the Studio Museum in Harlem. His work is in The Saatchi Gallery Collection in London and in the Rubell Family Collection in Miami.
ABOUT BEELER GALLERY
Beeler Gallery is the main public exhibition space at Columbus College of Art & Design. The gallery showcases work by award-winning contemporary artists and designers from around the world. Beeler Gallery also brings world-class speakers — from animators and authors to filmmakers and designers — to talk at CCAD as part of the Beeler Gallery Visiting Artists & Scholars series. All events are free and open to the public. For more information, visit http://beelergallery.org/aaron-fowler/.
EXHIBITION-RELATED EVENTS
Aaron Fowler: Tough Love opens on Monday, June 13, 2016, and runs through Saturday, Sept. 10, 2016, at Beeler Gallery, 60 Cleveland Ave., Columbus, OH 43206. On Thursday, Sept. 8, Aaron Fowler will join the artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins for a discussion as part of the Beeler Gallery Visiting Artists & Scholars series. All events are free and open to the public.
MEDIA CONTACT
For hi-res images or more information, contact Jeannie Nuss at 614.222.6162 or jnuss@ccad.edu.
Beeler Gallery
Columbus College of Art & Design
60 Cleveland Ave.
Columbus, OH 43215
The Beeler Gallery is located on the first floor of the Canzani Center, on the southeast corner of Cleveland Avenue and Gay street.
For more information, click here.
