ALL EXHIBITIONS

George Rush

New Works

31.05 – 06.07.2002

Galerie Mikael Andersen presents a young painter to the Danish art public. The 31 year old painter George Rush lives and works in New York City.

 

In this ongoing series of work, George Rush paints views of a fictional house. The imagined house represented in Rush's paintings is a hybrid from many sources, including the architecture of Mies van der Rohe, Pierre Chareau, and the traditional New England homes of the artist's childhood. The objects and furniture that populate the pictures are similarly drawn from many sources: books and magazines, as well as the artist's own photographs and memory.

 

There is an intentional familiarity in the choice of Rush's subjects, without being wholly referential. On display in his rooms are baroque and modernist furniture, familial artifacts and knick-knacks. Also on display here is the artist's continuing dialogue with American realist painting and modernist painting traditions. The juxtapositions in Rush's paintings bring to mind the subjects of solitude and inheritance.

 

George Rush uses the house as an embracing frame for the handling of objects and conditions of light, allowing him to explore various pictorial ideas and psychological moods. Fundamentally, it is the possibility of making concrete an ambiguous space that fascinates him. The paintings are atmospheric and the compositions are optically absorptive. The paintings are constructed with dense layers of paint, but show almost no signs of casual domestic life, engaging the viewer in a tension between iconographic loneliness and painterly intimacy.