Tuesday 24th September the Richter Fine Art Gallery opens the new exhibition season 2024/2025 with Cosmic Joke, the first solo exhibition in the gallery dedicated to Sam Bornstein. The exhibition features a group of works created in New York that address themes that the artist has been grappling with for some time. The pictorial vignettes invoke a transcendental humor, referencing contemporary life in invented narrative compositions, where ordinary earthly existence meets the sphere of the miraculous. The exhibition is open until November 8, 2024.
The title Cosmic Joke refers to an idiom, according to which there is an implicit humor in the idea that the cosmos can appear to be a preordained flow of events. The artist, inspired by the theory of the fantastic of the structuralist philosopher Tzvetan Todorov, a literary genre that investigates the uncertainty between belief and disbelief in the supernatural, considers this as an intersection, like a fertile ground, where the boundaries and possibilities can be expanded compared to what normally happens in a painting.
Rather than addressing contemporary life issues or various forms of determinism from a realistic perspective, the artist focuses on how these are filtered through individual and collective imagination. In this process, the imagery is freed from a rigid narrative function, so the artist interprets commonly banal situations with an eye for sensitivity, absurdity and wit.
Bornstein’s subjects are often groups of people engaged in strange and indefinable work and leisure activities, appearing as mental and fleeting images, imbued with a strong sense of the otherworldly and playful. Responding to a subjective and visionary logic, the scenes always draw on elements of the artist’s daily life, while maintaining a narrative complexity rich in ambiguity. By superimposing amorphous brush strokes of color on the images, in some cases the sense of a rough, faded or unfinished painting is maintained, so much so that the surface of the paintings resembles worn pages. Often this atmospheric texture is accentuated by the use of a variety of techniques and media used beneath the oil glazes: spray paint, ink, polyurethane, poured acrylic, stencil, colored chalk and graphite.
What the works on display have in common is that they arise from the particular sensitivity and condition of the artist, who has allowed himself to be freely influenced by multiple interests,
canons and the eclectic melting pot of his 1990s New York origins. Consequently, the works also draw on this composite mix of cultural experiences, from which Sam Bornstein has sensitively chosen the affections on which to build his pictorial research, intertwining myths, archetypes, the sense of the bizarre and the sacred.
The exhibition is accompanied by the third edition of the artist’s book ‘Quaderno’ by the Richter Fine Art Gallery, published by Aniene Publishing by Alessandro Dandini de Sylva. The publication collects unpublished drawings by the artist in ink on paper, revealing the trace of a hand that works in a diaristic sense and in dialogue with time, also becoming a tool to project dreams, ideas and dreamlike narratives.
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Sam Bornstein (1983, New York) lives and works in New York. He graduated from the MFA, Hunter College, 2018 and the BA, Bard College, New York, 2005. Solo exhibitions include: PlayroomCharles Moffett Gallery, New York, 2023; Astral BlueEmbajada Gallery, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2023; Variety LoftsCharles Moffett Gallery, New York, 2022; Daydream Workshop, Charles Moffett Gallery, New York, 2018-2019. Group shows include: Not Too LateCharles Moffett Gallery, New York, 2024; The VeilTwelve Ten Gallery, Chicago, 2024; Jorn, Og Nye Kunstner På Vej, Galerie Moderne, Silkeborg, Denmark, 2023; PhantomsSalon 8, Hamburg, Germany, 2023; NADA NY and MiamiCharles Moffett Gallery, 2023; KansasSalon 8, Hamburg, Germany, 2022; We Here (We Here)Embajada, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2022; Out of Place, Monti8, Latina, Italy, 2022; Brooklyn Bridge, McBride Contemporain, Montreal, Canada, 2022; Transmissions, Underdonk, Brooklyn, New York, 2021; The Neighbors, The Catskills, New York, 2021; Something Reassuringly HopelessBass & Reiner San Francisco, California, 2020; Familiars, George Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, 2020; Quarantine CopyKunstverein Miagao, Philippines, 2020; Baby MOMA, At Peace Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, 2020; Pungent DystopiaFreight & Volume, New York, 2020; Purple, Underdonk, Brooklyn, New York, 2020. MECA Art FairEmbajada, San Juan Puerto Rico, 2019; Original Copy, Alta, Malmö, Sweden, 2019; Think In Pictures, Amelchenko, 32 Orchard Street, New York, 2019; The Joke Is On You, Embajada, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2019; Group ExhibitionContra Gallery, Zagreb, Croatia, 2018; Summer stillness, Galerie Moderne Silkeborg, Silkeborg, Denmark, 2018; Ærø Kunsthal Museum of Modern Art, Ærø, Denmark, 2018; Bathers, Bass & Reiner, San Francisco, California, 2018; Points of Light in a Nocturnal WorldMetro Pictures Project Space at 7Herkimer Place, New York, 2018; A World of PeopleUnderdonk, Brooklyn, New York, 2018; EscapeHoney Ramka, Brooklyn, New York, 2018; Hunter College MFA Exhibition205 Hudson Street Gallery, New York, 2017; Everything You’ve Ever WantedAgency, New York, 2017; American Visual ArtMarina Tsvetaeva Museum, Moscow, 2013; Dürer’s RhinocerosLeRoy Neiman Gallery at Columbia University, New York, 2010; Artist’s ChoiceLohin Geduld, New York, 2009. Works in public collections include: Ærø Kunsthal Museum of Modern Art, Ærø, Denmark; Marina Tsvetaeva Museum, Moscow.
Carlo Franza