Michael Coughlan

03.12.2004 - 08.01.2005
WE HAVE (HAD) THE TECHNOLOGY

Stalke Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition We Have (Had) the Technology featuring work by Los Angeles artist Michael Coughlan. The exhibit includes recent paintings, drawings and pastels and will run from Friday, December 3, 2004, through Saturday, January 8, 2005.
 
Coughlan’s work uses the codes of modernist picture making, emphasizing those of surrealism and sixties conceptual art. In his work, these codes appear to be adulterated and twisted through his use of pop cultural iconography, illustrative style, as well as his own subjectivity. This recent work also incorporates aspects of his surroundings in Los Angeles, such as abandoned desert landscapes, the light quality that exists there and the detritus that fills them. Rather than creating a pastiche or directly quoting any particular artwork or style, Coughlan uses the conventions of previous art movements as well as pop culture as a repertoire of strategies to be borrowed from at will and filtered through his own idiosyncratic sensibilities. The results are both experiential and evocative of an emergent symbolization, creating a tone that is simultaneously humorous and melancholy.

Coughlan’s images develop from pen on paper drawings arrived at through a type of automatic writing. This explains their somewhat self-exploratory character. His forms are then worked into pastels, and later into paintings. At each stage there is a respect for the particular qualities of the medium used, as well as an attempt to subvert and further its conventions.

We Have (Had) the Technology is accompanied by a full-colour catalogue of works in the show with an essay by Los Angeles writer Jan Tumlir.

Michael Coughlan earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design for Painting in 1988 and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1991. He received a grant from the Pollack-Krasner Foundation in 1996 and has lived in Los Angeles and New York for the past 13 years. His work has been exhibited in solo exhibits at Sara Meltzer’s gallery in New York and Works on Paper in Los Angeles, as well as numerous group shows. Most recently he was included in Mama’s Boy at White Columns in New York and Eight Artists at 4-F in Los Angeles.


Return to list