Monya Rowe Gallery is energized to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Bryan Rogers titled Woodland.
“Just ahead of the pandemic, I moved to South Orange, NJ. I beloved the architecture and heritage, in particular the post business office and its’ WPA-commissioned mural [The Works Progress Administration was created by President Roosevelt in 1935, during one of the bleakest years of the Great Depression]. The mural’s painter was Bernard Perlin. Perlin’s tableaux was an idealized, symbolic slice of lifetime of the nearby group. I was encouraged by the mural’s official features, as effectively as the paradoxical tension and placidity of the guys depicted. I preferred to do my possess take on determine and landscape painting, and employed Perlin’s mural as a scaffold of an strategy to build my possess globe.
“Becoming queer is intrinsic to my romantic relationship to the earth, how I interact with other men and women, and the work I make. My figures are an amalgam of center-aged queer males with whom I’m most acquainted/familial: myself, my brother, and my lover. The men in my paintings are nude. Their nudity returns them to an animalistic state. They are not predators — I think of them as like deer going via the woods or goldfish in an aquarium. They really don’t feel about how foolish and susceptible they could be, and they continue to be this way as extended as they hold to their enclosures.” —Bryan Rogers, New Jersey, 2022