Terry Rodgers - Angels of Desire

In his biggest and most audacious show to date, American painter Terry Rodgers will present ten new works in his first Amsterdam exhibition. Continuing his exploration of American culture and the visual rhetoric of desire in the twenty-first century, Rodgers has produced new paintings of dramatic boldness and electrifying insight into an America and an entire Western culture simultaneously galvanized by terror and sated by technologically-driven ease.

Rodgers captures the individual’s uneasy balance between ennui and angst in collective portraits of young adults with a lot on their minds and little on their bodies.

In the past year, Rodgers has shown his works in Milan, Miami, New York, and Los Angeles. He continues to enjoy an enthusiastic European reception for his large paintings.

Even as high fashion retreats from the revelations of skin, Rodgers continues to illuminate the spiritual nakedness of a generation basking in affluence and cowering in terror. He paints a world stuck between memorials and menace on the one hand and fixated on the desire for desire on the other. It is a transhistorical realm where Plato meets Nero meets the latest celebrity sensation who is here today and gone tomorrow.

Torch’s Adriaan van der Have is delighted to see the new works arriving. “Terry Rodgers’ large visceral paintings capture the energy, enthusiasm, sexiness, and complexity of a modern, youth-obsessed culture. His gorgeous large oils are in a style that is both firmly realist and wildly innovative. Rodgers deftly paints the bold experimentation and the poignant uncertainty of the hippest of the hip in their exploration of fashion, form, attitude, and behavior.”

Jim Zimmerman, whose new book, Vectors of Desire, offers the first comprehensive treatment of the painter’s oeuvre, observes, “Rodgers is working with an energy and confidence unparalleled among American painters.” Zimmerman says, “It is remarkable to see what he has accomplished in the past two years. Terry Rodgers is on top of every trend because he is literally out on the streets, spotting things as they happen, and taking them with him into the studio. He is plugged into the current and the currencies of desire. He has a remarkable capacity to recognize what is new and get it onto the canvas while at the same time showing us the unchanging nature of humanity.”

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Terry Rodgers - Angels of Desire