Steve Hurd

Rosamund Felsen Gallery is pleased to present eleven new paintings by Steve Hurd. Not unlike the work he produced in the nineties, when Hurd painted large messy reproductions of women’s magazines in which housewives were enticed with pictures of big sweet dessert pastries and then told in the text they’re too fat. Hurd continues to discuss what he sees as a dysfunction of American culture, by making work from the things he finds unfair and irritating and through this process feels some relief as if he is scratching an itch.

In a work titled, “The Devil is in the Details” Hurd may have found the most irritating of all subjects. Military spokesman, Major General William Caldwell, suggesting art as a rationale to quell rising concerns over the war in Iraq, Caldwell said, “Every great work of art goes through messy phases while in transition”. By evoking Hurd’s own work process as a metaphor for an unjust war, this statement seemed most egregious, but like the General’s assertion Hurd does make his own “great work” by wrecking and fixing things and then messing them up all over again. These paintings have a layered history, of a liquidly atmosphere in which some other place is being described. Whether tumbling through the vertigo of the artist’s hyper enlarged thumbprint, or sucked into the mute blackness engulfing a deflated globe, Hurd’s incendiary messy phases transpose even the tiniest of details into the ominous syntax of today’s headline news.

Steve Hurd