Keegan McHargue

Keegan McHargue is an American artist born in 1982 at Portland, Oregon, USA. He lives and works in New york, USA.

Solo exhibitions

2008

• "Well Charged" Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris, France
• "The Process Group", Metro Pictures Gallery, New York, USA

2007

• "The Yellow Spectrum", Jack Hanley Gallery, San Franscisco, USA
• "Bubble Eyes", Hiromi Yoshii Gallery, Tokyo, Japan

2006

• "Air Above Moutains (Building Within)", Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris, France
• "The control Group", Metro Pictures, New York, USA
• "Jack Hanley", San Francisco, USA

2005

• "Drawing Circles", Hiromi Yoshii Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
• "Building for Water", Jack Hanley Gallery, Los Angeles, California, USA

2004

• "The Suns' Son Mends Man's Path", Statements -Art Basel/Miami Beach, Miami, USA
• "Feel the Wind", Jack Hanley Gallery, Jack Hanley Annex, San Francisco, USA

2003

• "The Wolfman Cometh", Rivington Arms, May 16-June 22, New York, USA
• "Keegan McHargue and Matt Lienes", The Wrong Gallery, New York, USA

Expositions collectives

2008

• "Imaginary Realities" Max Wigram Gallery, London, United-Kingdom
• "Brevities Rainbow", Cinders Gallery, Brooklyn, USA

2007

• "The Melvins", Mandrake, Los Angeles, USA
• " ...what will be told of today tomorrow : KölnShow2", European Kunsthalle, Köln, Germany
• Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Miami, USA

2006

• "Only the Paranoid Survive", Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, New York, USA
• "Panic Room - Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection" DESTE Foundation, Athens, Greece
• "Air Above Moutains (Building Within)" Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris, France
• "Köln Show" by Kunsthalle of Köln, Germany

2005

• "Bay Area Now 4", Yerba Buena Center, San Francisco, California, USA
• "Gallery Artists", Jack Hanley Gallery, Los Angeles, California, USA
• "Artist for White Columns", Whit Columns, New York, USA
• "Art Review : Top 25 Emerging Artists", Phillips de Pury, New York, USA
• "Yo mire un garza mora dandole combate a un rio", curated by Devendra Banhart, Atelier Cardenas Bellanger, Paris, France

2004

• "Incantations", Metro Pictures, New York, USA
• "Delivier Us From Evil : Dinos & Jake Chapman, R. Crumb, Honore Daumier, Dr. Lakra, Keegan McHargue", Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, USA
• "Lo-Gressive Living : Works on Paper from the San Francisco Bay Area", The Approach Gallery, London, United-Kingdom
• "Majority Whip", White Box, New York, USA
• "Dessins et des Autres", Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris, France
• "Mental Space", Wendy Cooper Gallery, Madison, Wisconsin, USA
• "Paperwork", Savage Art Ressources, Portland, Oregon, USA
• "K48 Funhouse", curated by Scott Hug, Deitch Projects, New York, USA

2003

• "We Are Electric", curated by Chris Perez, Deitch Projects, New York, USA
• "Balant Localism", Leo Koenig Annex, New York, USA
• "Today's Man", Hiromi Yoshii Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
• "Today's Man", John Connely Presents, New York, USA
• "Retreat", Peres Projects, Los Angeles, California, USA
• "Teenage Rebel : The Bedroom Show", Galerie du Jour, Agnes b., Paris, France
• "Dirt Wizards", Brooklyn Fire Proof Inc., New York, USA
• "Russel Simmons' Art for Life Auction Preview", Kenny Schnachter ConTEMPorary, New York, USA
• "Group Show", PNCA, curated by Ian Hawk, Gallery 500, Portland, Oregon, USA

2002

• "Alife Store", Deitch Projects, New York, USA
• "Alife Store", Roberts And Tilton, Los Angeles, California, USA
• "No War", Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco, California, USA
• "From the Trenchs", New Image Arts, Los Angeles, California, USA
• "Skate on wall", Nagoya Parko Museum Galleries, Tokyo, Japan
• "Skate on wall", Rocket Japan, Tokyo, Japan

Texte

From Will Bradley, june 2008

New lands appeared on the horizon. The huge zinc colored glove, with its terrible golden fingernails, swinging over the shop door in the sad wind blowing on city afternoons, revealed to me, with its index finger pointing down at the flagstones of the pavement, the hidden signs of a new melancholy . In Keegan McHargue's work, the painting is both backdrop and stage, each work an uncanny tableau from a world not entirely unlike reality, in which grotesque characters are caught, unable to escape the capricious and twisted logic that produced them. Cut-out figures float over depthless grids, while the arches and walkways around them dead-end in the sudden flat-coloured ground of the canvas. Monstrous creatures attest to the potential of any part of the scene to develop into any other, to effloresce, bifurcate, become translucent or prismatic, according to the scheme of each unfolding allegory. Fragmented views of factories of obscure purpose, their arcane pipework dripping flat teardrops, build into melancholy systems whose imagined functions reflect psychological circuits as much as they allude to the arbitrary and controlling infrastructures of the contemporary political economy. The faces that stare out of this fractured, animistic surface range from those of sentient puppets just free enough to flash a helpless, puzzled look to the audience as the scenery melts around them, to the carnivalesque masks of participants in some unknown, degenerate ritual.

McHargue's latest works appear as close-ups from these scenes, the backgrounds zoomed in to reveal shifting, uneven patterns or open grounds of flat colour, the figures caught as if for unintended portraits. A decadent opulence, the gloss of prefabricated luxury and candy-striped indulgence, takes over from the implacable dream-architecture and constricting mechanisms of the earlier scenes, but the underlying landscape of fractured subjectivity and its potential for arbitrary violence remains. The usual laws are suspended in favour of the play of surfaces, overlaid and shifting, swelling or cracking open to reveal the illusion that is their substance.

Throughout the work there's a sense that the question is not how can the painting depict the world, but how does the world invade, affect and shape the endlessly mutable space of the painting. A potential abstract order is continually undercut by its unstoppable tendency to represent, and the works stage an oddly moral struggle between the seductive possibilities of the painted surface and a responsibility to some recoverable reality, an unfolding engagement that has overflowed the boundaries of allegory to occupy not only the symbolic figures but the entire visual field.

'Will Bradley is a writer and curator based in Oslo.

Link

http://www.galerieperrotin.com