INQUIRIES
Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to announce Blake Rayne’s Dog Ears, a presentation of new paintings from the artist’s current series of folded canvases.
Since the 1990s, Rayne has variously engaged the production of abstract painting through the use of different iterations of the fold. In these new paintings, strips of canvas are folded, sprayed, sewn, and stretched to create forms and registrations derived from the folding motion’s inherent generation of obstructions and blind spots. Allegorically, these paintings can be understood as markers of expansions and compressions in time. The bent-angle creases throughout bring to mind the dog-ear, a mnemonic folding device used to suspend a moment of reading in memory.
Blake Rayne (b. 1969, Lewes, Delaware) lives and works in New York. He attended the California Institute of the Arts, received a fellowship from the American Acadamy in Berlin (2010), and has taught at Columbia University’s School of Visual Arts. In 2016-17, Cabin of the Accused, the first survey exhibition of Rayne’s work, was presented at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, Texas. Solo exhibitions include Yogurt Cinema (A Certain Lack of Coherence, Porto, 2019), Brother Ass (Central Fine, Miami, 2019), DOGSKULLDOGS (Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, 2018), and Carbon Days (Nuno Centeno, Porto, 2018), among others. His work was included in Collected by Thea Westreich and Ethan Wagner at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2016, Chat Jet: Painting <Beyond> the Medium Medium (Künstlerhaus, Graz, 2013), and group shows at Bergen Kunsthall, The Kitchen, SculptureCenter, Artists Space, Gladstone Gallery, Gagosian Gallery, Reena Spaulings, Greene Naftali, and American Fine Arts.
Tense and Spaced Out: Polar Nights, Glacial Chaos, and the Ecology of Misery, a monograph covering the last decade of the artist’s output, with texts by John Kelsey, David Lewis, Jaleh Mansoor, Laura Owens, Sean Paul, and Javier Sánchez Martínez, was published by Sequence Press/Blaffer Art Museum/Sternberg Press in 2017.
Rayne’s paintings are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, FRAC Poitou-Charentes, the Pinault Collection, the Portland Museum of Art and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.
