Reopening of G Fine Art with A.B. Miner: Naked

G Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by A.B. Miner as the first show in its new space at 1350 Florida Ave, N.E.

Miner's intimately scaled self portraits are radical for their obsessively painted surfaces and raw emotional content. Primarily through the use of impastoed oil paint, but also via pencil drawings and for the first time film, the artist's diaristic practice documents the permeability of flesh, a struggle for control over the body, and the limits of emotional resilience.

The exhibition Naked takes its title from a painted diptych in the exhibition, which shows on one side what Miner’s paintings look like in their earlier iterations, pencil on board, and on the other the finished product with the disjointed planes of vibrant color he has become known for. Like Naked, all of the exhibition’s works reveal what the artist and many people hide from the outside world. Concealing inner turmoil and bodily irregularities and remaining elusive about the details of a creative process are themes Miner hopes will resonate with viewers.

In “From There to Here,” a twelve-panel progression of paintings spanning 16 feet and made between 2007 and 2010, Miner chronicles one year of healing scars. Employing an even more dramatic macro view than his previous work, these paintings confront viewers with a simultaneously gruesome and beautiful homage to the human body’s potential for metamorphosis.

Miner’s first film piece, Fly 08, revisits Yoko Ono’s legendary Fly (1970) – an experimental, conceptual film and feminist consideration of the human body. Miner’s work enlists the components of the original, capturing on 16mm film a prone unclothed body as a landscape and backdrop for the explorations of a live insect. Fly 08 alternates close-ups and long shots capturing the behavior of the fly while patiently revealing the physiognomy of the somewhat exploited host, the artist himself. An original score by sound artist Richard Chartier accompanies the footage, which was recorded and edited by filmmaker Ron Toole.

Four small, painted facial self-portraits expose emotional scars. In two of the works he ventures into new territory situating himself in a large sea of glossy, white enamel thus capturing the feeling of being lost and empty. Three delicate pencil drawings round out the exhibition.

Al Miner (b. 1977, New York, New York) is an artist, curator, and curatorial assistant at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. For the Hirshhorn he curated projects with Yoko Ono and Dan Graham and has worked with Smithsonian Artist Research Fellows Runa Islam and Henrique Oliveira. In spring 2009 he curated "Domesticated: Men and the Domestic Interior" at Transformer Gallery. In fall 2009 he was awarded a German travel fellowship from the Goethe Institut to spend one month in Berlin in 2010. As an artist he has exhibited extensively and received awards including the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities Young Artist Program Grant and two Artist’s Fellowship Awards. Miner holds an M.F.A. in painting and mixed media from Queens College, CUNY (2000) and a post-graduate certificate in museum studies from the George Washington University (2006).

Exhibition: March 20 - May 1
Gallery hours: Wednesday to Saturday, 12pm - 6pm