HALSEY MCKAY GALLERY

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Halsey McKay is pleased to present Well Maintained, Christian Little’s first solo exhibit with the gallery. Christian Little’s paintings call into question the idea of maintained appearances and act as artifacts of the artist’s experiences growing up in the Hamptons in a working class family. The central themes of Little’s work are class, vanity, labor, leisure, and perceptions of “reality.”

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Little’s acrylic paintings are based on contradiction. They are simultaneously erotic and sterile, stiff and fluid, analytic and absurd, actual and artificial. His imagery examines our voyeur culture preoccupied with sex, body image, drama and the lives of others. Abstracted figures engage in strange spaces and perform maintenance-based activities: shaving, bathing, scrubbing the shower floor, lifting weights, toweling off and straightening up. Marble surfaces, steam, mops, sponges, rubber gloves, and smoke are rendered in virtuosic trompe l’oeil. The faux-finishing and decorative painting techniques used in Little’s work encourage a self-conscious artifice that allows objects and spaces to both demonstrate and resist their inherent lack of dimension, recalling the shrinking divide between a life depicted online and lived IRL. Like a set on daytime or reality TV, pornography or a commercial, Christian Little’s paintings allude to, yet are removed from, the “real world.”

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