Juxtapoz Magazine – Bryan Rogers “Woodland” @ Monya Rowe Gallery, NYC

Monya Rowe Gallery is psyched to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Bryan Rogers titled Woodland.

“Just in advance of the pandemic, I moved to South Orange, NJ. I cherished the architecture and history, in particular the publish place of work and its’ WPA-commissioned mural [The Works Progress Administration was created by President Roosevelt in 1935, during one of the bleakest years of the Great Depression]. The mural’s painter was Bernard Perlin. Perlin’s tableaux was an idealized, symbolic slice of everyday living of the local community. I was encouraged by the mural’s formal characteristics, as perfectly as the paradoxical rigidity and placidity of the adult males depicted. I required to do my very own get on figure and landscape painting, and utilised Perlin’s mural as a scaffold of an thought to construct my personal environment.

“Being queer is intrinsic to my romance to the environment, how I interact with other people, and the do the job I make. My figures are an amalgam of middle-aged queer males with whom I’m most acquainted/familial: myself, my brother, and my partner. The men in my paintings are nude. Their nudity returns them to an animalistic point out. They are not predators — I consider of them as like deer transferring as a result of the woods or goldfish in an aquarium. They do not believe about how foolish and susceptible they could possibly be, and they keep on being this way as extensive as they hold to their enclosures.” —Bryan Rogers, New Jersey, 2022