FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Curated by Andrea Teschke
Opening reception: Friday, October 14, 6-8 pm

Friedrich Petzel Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Troy Brauntuch.

"Everything is transitory, and distraction is the basis of our collective cultural perception of the world: there seems to be an implicit prohibition upon silences, pauses, authentic recognitions and prolonged absorption. In the depthless depth of a Brauntuch work, everything happens just behind the surface of appearance, and those prohibitions are broken." - Joshua Decter, 1996

Troy Brauntuch will unveil a new series of 10 works on cotton and 7 color photographs. For close to thirty years, Brauntuch has been drawing us into a world where the picture is the center of the mode of representation, with an autonomous function as a culturally coded phenomenon. His process both physical and conceptual, simultaneously erases and layers time, space, and meaning.

The works in this exhibition continue Brauntuch's investigation into public and private imagery and its function through drawings and photographs. The most recent drawn works illuminate views of a private world and introduces them to the public realm. The images are from his immediate domestic environment- such as the sensation of light falling on the pattern of his girlfriend's coat, or a staggered view of his tabby cat passing a snakeskin modern chair. Conversely, Brauntuch plumbs the life of a mediated image- the view of the dust-laden shirts stacked in retail shelving in a suite of three large canvases.

In the photographs, the viewer is presented with images that float in the ethereal, but are deeply rooted in material presence. These images literally circulate around and are in relation to those seen in the canvases. Raking sunlight falling on a table or streaming through a curtained window provides an opportunity to project into this place, approximating the cinematic feeling of slow motion. Time seems as it is almost stopped, a fleeting moment that will become forever.

"When everything that was directly lived had moved away into a representation, there was no real life, yet no other life seemed real." – Greil Marcus

The work of Troy Brauntuch is in many prominent public collections including; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His work was seen recently in Philadelphia at the Institute of Contemporary Art in the show Springtide.

This will be Troy Brauntuch's first exhibition with Friedrich Petzel Gallery. The exhibition will open October 14, with a reception from 6-8 p.m. and will be on view through November 12. For further information, please contact the gallery at info@petzel.com, or call (212) 680-9467.