Stephen Pusey’s critical and aesthetic journey to his paintings in 2020 - 2021 will help pave the way to his most recent series of paintings in 2024 - 2025. The original exhibition was during the early part of the Covid pandemic, a challenging and distracting time for many. Thus, it seemed important and worth sharing that mapping exercise again to set the stage for his newest paintings in an upcoming exhibition.
David Richard Gallery is pleased to re-present, Strange Attractors, the gallery’s first solo exhibition in 2021 for New York artist, Stephen Pusey. This exhibition focused on eleven new paintings from 2020 and 2021, conceived of and created during the Covid 19 pandemic and the shutdowns therefrom. While that, then, new series of paintings was rooted in the artist’s familiar complex overlays of linear abstractions and dense colors with references to calligraphy and symbols, those new paintings, at the time were aesthetically different from Pusey’s more recent series of paintings. The key divergent characteristic was the emergence of distinct forms that often nodded to representational elements, albeit still quite abstract and obscured. Thus, to map the, then, recent visual migration, the original solo presentation included: three paintings each from 2019, three from 2018 and three more from 2017.