Night & Day On Main
Evan Feldman
Director
efeldman@gpgallery.com
Opening reception with the artist: Friday, June 16, 5-8PM
Gerald Peters Contemporary is pleased to present Night & Day On Main, an exhibition of new paintings by Tom Birkner. This is his third solo exhibition at the gallery in Santa Fe.
Carefully observed and chromatically inventive, Birkner’s paintings of Main Street America seek to illuminate the direct, personal, common, and unsung. The subjects- a toddler reaching for his teenage mother’s hand, a romping graduation celebration in an abandoned factory, the loneliness of an empty street late at night- are rendered in Birkner’s signature gritty realism. Building his canvases through the application of numerous layers of paint, Birkner aggressively applies and scrapes away paint until the everyday circumstances take on vivid cinematic quality. And although far from Rockwellian, Birkner remains sensitive to idiosyncrasies, depicting places and people who are endearing, mysterious, and wholly themselves.
Birkner received his B.A. from Rutgers University and his M.F.A. from Pennsylvania State University. He is a two-time recipient of the New Jersey State Council on The Arts Fellowship, and his work was recently exhibited at the El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, Texas and Centro Cultural de las Fronteras, Juárez, Mexico. He has been featured in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally and has earned reviews in the New York Times and ARTnews.
First and foremost, Main Street is not Wall Street. Nor is it corporate or cosmopolitan. It isn't
online, thriving, successful and glamorous. It isn't "the future". And in Birkner's paintings this is
a good thing. It's the opposition to the predictability and conformity of mainstream American
life that makes Main Street so worthwhile.
