ALEX DODGE & TOM LADUKE

Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Alex Dodge and Tom LaDuke. We Contain Multitudes opens on 28 April and will remain on view through 4 June 2022. This is the inaugural exhibition of Miles McEnery Gallery’s fourth and newest gallery location at 525 West 22nd Street, contributing to a combined Chelsea presence of nearly 26,000 square feet. The fourth gallery is ideally situated a few doors down from the current 511 and 515 locations. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by Evan Moffitt.

"Dodge began working with 3D simulations in 2001 by photographing images inside a swimming pool, reworking them with software to remove the blur of water on the camera lens, and then translating the images into paintings. Now, Dodge alters his own drawings with software, so that his process begins and ends with his own hand. His forms often resemble objects swaddled in richly variegated textiles, with each fold offering a different transformation of the original pattern."

- Evan Moffitt, in "Shadow Play"

"Few painters appear to be as different as Alex Dodge and Tom LaDuke. Dodge’s crisply rendered, rumpled patterns, stenciled so that they acquire the texture of their referent fabrics, have a unique physical presence that invites our touch. By contrast, LaDuke’s juxtaposition of abstract gestures—some brushed impasto, others poured or stenciled—atop foggy, inscrutable landscapes seem to place the physical world just out of reach, as if behind a pane of steamed glass."

- Evan Moffitt, in "Shadow Play"

"At first, [the rainbows] were a representation of my wife. She was trying to incorporate a rainbow into a dark drawing, without using any white. I like to get them in traditionally with a paintbrush, even though most people think it’s an airbrush. That’s my little joke to myself. Rainbows are hard to make. They’re beautiful to me."

"More recently, LaDuke has returned to the scene of the mediated crime, rendering specific contemporary art galleries as the unstable grounds for his surface abstractions. See, for instance, in "all the whispers between us" (2022), how the original layers of vast, anonymous space with whitewashed walls, skylights, and track lighting has been suddenly riven by a seismic crack, while a disembodied head, like a phantasmal viewer, emerges from the vengeful earth. Galleries, LaDuke says, 'are bizarre chapels of commerce,' often cold and empty, always quiet, simultaneously private yet public."

Evan Moffitt, in "Shadow Play"