Charles Ryan Becker
On the fence, open city
October 20-November 13, 2022
Sprague Gallery
Extinct Mammular Form, 2021, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches
These excerpted paintings from 2021 show bodily forms in the processes of creation and destruction. The figures rest within the same plane as their negative space, considering the division between portraiture and landscape, and life and death. Cities are at odds with animals and insects, which seem, at points, to morph into cityscapes themselves containing modern symbols (roads, maps, buildings).
– Charles Ryan Becker
Sprague Gallery is pleased to announce Charles Ryan Becker – On the fence, open city, an exhibition of paintings by Charles Ryan Becker (Pomona ’23, Art and Art History).
In the selected works, Becker thinks about figure, one in milieu of sociopolitical, historical, and natural forces. The interchange between the figure and the forces is not without tension and parallels the artist’s alternation between drawing and painting. The figure that in drawing assumes force of its own – Becker ‘press[es] hard on the paper’ – in painting inevitably sinks into the workings of the oil mediums. It is in painting where the figure that is resistant is also the most fluid; and it is out of the resistant figure in dissolving that a new form emerges. The open city.
Charles Ryan Becker – On the fence, open city opens on October 20 and continues through November 13, 2022. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 8AM to 5PM. The exhibition is open to the public. The Covid-19 guidelines will be updated as new information becomes available.
The exhibition is curated by arts director Julia Hong of the HMC Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts.