Friedrich Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce Painting, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Stephen Prina. The show will be on view from February 18 – March 8, 2012 and remain on view from March 13 – April 28, 2012. The opening reception will be held on Saturday February 18, from 6:00 – 8:00pm

Stephen Prina’s seventh exhibition at Friedrich Petzel Gallery will consist of three triptych paintings. These paintings are made on commercially produced linen window blinds with the final installation comprised of 9 blinds that hang from the ceiling. The blinds function both as sculptural objects as well as a support for Prina’s typical abstract gestural brushstrokes in shades of red, yellow, and blue. Prina transfers the three primary colors that have been repeatedly drawn on by modernist artists such as Piet Mondrian or Barnett Newman into an architectural setting.

Prina's work often embraces the principle of the relay race. His work develops in a series of long-term projects that he frequently rearranges and re-presents in different exhibition and associative contexts. The blind painting, for example, was first created as a single element for his 2008 Whitney Biennial installation The Second Sentence of Everything I read is You, 2006. This act of painting was later expanded into an entire exhibition, He was but a bad translation, in the spring of 2011 at the Koelnischer Kunstverein, Germany. These new paintings will be exhibited along side three works from the cycle Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet, in which Prina indexically draws on the complete oeuvre of Eduard Manet and reinterprets each piece in ink washes on rag paper. In addition, one diptych from Untitled/Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet will be displayed.

This will be Stephen Prina's seventh exhibition with Friedrich Petzel Gallery. The exhibition will open on Saturday, February 18, 2012 from 6:00 – 8:00 PM and will remain on view through March 8. The exhibition will reopen on March 13 and remain on view through April 28. Friedrich Petzel Gallery is located at 535 West 22nd Street, New York, New York 10011. For press inquiries, please contact Janine Latham at janine@petzel.com, or call (212) 680-9467.