JIMMY WRIGHT & CHRISTOPHER CULVER
JIMMY & CHRISTOPHER
February 15th - March 24th
FIERMAN presents JIMMY & CHRISTOPHER, an exhibition of historic drawings from the 1970’s by Jimmy Wright (b. 1944) alongside new works on paper by Christopher Culver (b. 1985) at DIANA / 127 Henry St. Foregrounding the erotic within the unyieldingly rigid structural backdrop of New York City itself, both artists depict furtively brazen, and brazenly furtive, moments of gay sex and city life with raw veracity.
Christopher Culver’s renderings of the built environment and sexual liaisons result from a meticulous layering and erasing of pastel and charcoal. Known for his drawings of architectural spaces collaged together, Culver also depicts fading autobiographical scenes of intimacy in derelict urban spaces. The surfaces of his drawings resemble excavations, palimpsests of form and emotion, encounters of heat and uncanny coolness. A grainy rendering of a blue-hued bedroom scene abuts a drawing of a forlorn stuffed bunny, one of the artist’s recurring motifs. The pathos of Culver’s hands is cinematic; a narrative extends beyond the individual image to create worlds of entangled memories within waning American conditions.
Culver’s imagined cityscape resembles in many ways the New York that welcomed Jimmy Wright in the early 1970’s. Wright received a formative education at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied under Ray Yoshida alongside the artists who would comprise the Chicago Imagist Group. Upon arriving in the sexually liberated, fiscally bankrupt New York, Wright set to work both engaging in and documenting the febrile nightlife and sex scene at his door. His New York Underground drawings, only exhibited in the 21st Century, are remarkable for their stylistic variety. Wright’s pen and ink drawings depicting public sex in the toilets of movie theaters and the New York City Subway are quick, off-hand, confident in line, and humorous. The movie house toilets are breathlessly immediate; his jagged line infuses the work with both the artist’s physical presence - one can imagine his elevated heartbeat – while the subway toilets are cartoon-like, both sweet and raunchy in their depiction of of the diversity of men engaging in anonymous carnal pleasure.
Christopher Culver (b. 1985 Miami, Florida) lives and works in New York. He received his MFA from The University of Texas at Austin in 2013 where he studied at the School of Fine Arts and School of Architecture. Culver has had solo exhibitions at Chapter NY, New York; The Meeting, New York; A.D., New York; Redling Fine Arts, Los Angeles; Yautepec, Mexico City; and Queen’s Nails Annex, San Francisco. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Crèvecoeur, Paris; Michael Benevento, Los Angeles; Collaborations, Copenhagen, DNK; ECHO, Cologne, DEU; Downs & Ross, New York; Et al. etc., San Francisco; Lomex, New York; and Page Gallery, New York, among others.
Jimmy Wright (b. 1944, Tennessee) has been a New York-based artist since 1974. Recent solo exhibitions include Fierman, New York, NY (2022, 2019, 2016), M+B Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2019), and Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, IL (2023, 2016). Recent group and two artist exhibitions include Luxe, Calme, Volupté at Candice Madey, New York, NY; Jimmy Wright and Arch Connelly, Southern Illinois University Art Museum, Carbondale, IL; and Flowers at the Fin de Siècle: Renate Bertlmann, Robert Lettner, Jimmy Wright, 1990-1998, Wonnerth Dejaco Gallery, Vienna, Austria. In 2009, The Springfield Art Museum, MO, organized the retrospective, Jimmy Wright: Twenty Years of Painting and Pastels. Wright's work is in the collections of numerous institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; among others.
