"Mead Hall : James Rieck"
2010-04-23 until 2010-05-03
Lyons Wier Gallery
New York, NY, USA United States of America

Lyons Wier Gallery is pleased to announce "Mead Hall" a new solo show by artist James Rieck. Inspired by the heroic epic poem Beowulf, and J.R.R. Tolkien's 1936 lecture on this subject, The Monsters and the Critics, Rieck's new show engages not only with medieval themes of violence and romantic love, but also with the age-old division between literature and the visual arts.

Using visual tropes derived from master works, World of Warcraft, and costume advertisements, Rieck deftly composes pieces that are skillful, narrative, and palpably sexy. All paintings included in this series are produced in Grisaille - gray tones used as the under-painting for classical works, sometimes referred to as "'dead coloring"'. Rieck's large-scale painting "Wolf" (2010), contains rough peaks of dried white paint that give viewers the trompe l'oeil sensation of soft, dense fur. The spread wolf skin on the hard wooden floor, with its dead black eyes staring up at us, is at once reminiscent of the violence this animal endured, and foreshadowing of the sensual use to which this rug will (surely) soon be put to use. Rieck's thought-provoking show is not to be missed.

James Rieck is currently a faculty member at the Corcoran College of Art + Design in Washington, DC. He earned both his MFA and his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Glasgow School of Art. He has shown at the Flag Foundation, NYC, Charles Campbell Gallery, San Francisco, and the Corcoran Museum, Washington, DC. Rieck's work is present in the Burger Collection and the Bollag-Rothschild Collection, Switzerland, and the Chadha Collection, The Netherlands. Rieck lives and works in Baltimore and has been represented by Lyons Wier Gallery since 2003.

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