Press release
Baldwin Gallery is pleased to present our first show with artist Dan McCarthy. McCarthy’s artistic practice has superseded traditional media boundaries and includes drawing, painting, artist books and ceramic sculpture. His kinetic works are largely juicy and bright: loosely rendered in optimistic palettes. McCarthy was born in Hawaii, and grew up in Huntington Beach, California, and his artistic output is informed by the light of a beachy coastal landscape, sun-washed and fresh, and the exuberant Punk Rock ethos that amplifies brash naivete with raw emotion.
In the current show, ‘BirdPots’, McCarthy employs monolithic amphorae as an elemental force, a veritable terra cotta army of object making, explorations that disassociate the ‘vessel’ from function, and instead introduce the viewer to the distinctive personalities in simply rendered eager, guileless faces: all down-to-earth physicality, and the visible hand of the creator. McCarthy employs an expressionistic touch and wabi-sabi principles of studied imperfection, allowing drips to run down and visual effects picked out in gold like kintsugi repair, unstable glazes of midcentury terrazzo speckles, with eggs secreted inside for safety or like land mines set to some future detonation in a confetti firework explosion, tied in intimacy to physicality of ceramics: lip to lip with human clay.
Dan McCarthy has shown internationally and domestically for 30 years, and his works are included in numerous private and public permanent collections including ICA Miami, Florida; Aïshti foundation, Beirut, Lebanon; museum of modern art, New York; Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens, Greece; and Musee d’arte Moderne de Paris, Paris.
Images are available upon request. Please call 970.920.9797 for further information.