Suzanne Egeran Projects is pleased to present a pop-up exhibition (7019 Melrose Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90038) of new paintings by Sean Mellyn in Los Angeles. This is Mellyn’s first collaboration with Suzanne Egeran Projects and coincides with Frieze LA, the Felix Art Fair and Art Los Angeles Contemporary (ALAC).
Mellyn’s paintings, collectively titled Old MacDonald had a Farm, borrow scenes from a 1930s coloring book of the same name. Single pages from the book are combined with blind contour portraits , of the artist drawn by passersby during a residency in Las Vegas. (A blind contour portrait is drawn using a single, continuous line without looking down at the page.)
The result is a surreal re-imagining of the classic American nursery rhyme. Idyllic scenes of children engaged with farm animals and their chores become dark musings on American society. George Orwell’s political satire “Animal Farm” comes to mind as acid hues and wild color combinations spill across the page and defy the rigid confines of the coloring book format.
Sean Mellyn (b. 1965) lives and works in New York City. In 2015 he was an artist-in-residence at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, NJ, and maintains a studio there. In 2008, Mellyn was invited by the Art Production Fund to participate in the prestigious Artists at Giverny Residency Program at the Fondation Claude Monet in Giverny, France. Mellyn received his BFA from Pratt Institute and has been the subject of numerous solo and group shows. His works are included in many public collections including The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), The Whitney Museum of American Art, Denver Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF MoMA) and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The artist’s last solo show in Los Angeles was in 2002, at Roberts & Tilton.
The exhibition is open from Wednesday to Friday 11am to 5pm, Saturday 12 to 6pm, and by appointment. For further information please contact info@egeran.com or +1 917 545 4142.
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