Level & Co. to present GRIT: Graffiti, Grunge, and the 1990s

NEW YORK, Sept. 17, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Level & Co. is pleased to announce the exhibition of GRIT: Graffiti, Grunge, and the 1990s, featuring paintings by Christopher Wool, Glenn Ligon, Cecily Brown, Richard Prince, Martin Wong, Elizabeth Peyton, Yoshitomo Nara, and Banksy.

The artists in GRIT embody the spirit of the 1990s through subversive subjects, countercultural concepts, and guerrilla modes of production. Carrying the weight of a century and the anticipation of a new millennium, many artists in the ‘90s took it upon themselves to dissect and disrupt mainstream ideologies. A Do-It-Yourself attitude led to thriving subcultures that championed individuality and creativity. Their dialectical approaches to identity gave way to new considerations in painting beyond the rigidity of binaries like representation versus abstraction or graffiti versus fine art.

Christopher Wool’s monumental Untitled (1995) anchors the exhibition. Adopting an anti-compositional approach, Wool whites out preceding paint layers constructed from black enamel rollers, silkscreens, and spray paint with thick, dripping brushstrokes. A visual echo of municipal graffiti removal, the artwork employs urban aesthetics and commercial painting techniques to destabilize conventional notions of process and image.

The inclusion of Glenn Ligon’s Stranger #55 (2011) honors the origin of its series in 1997. These black oil stick and charcoal dust stenciled reproductions of James Baldwin’s essay critically engage with notions of race and sexuality through language and material. The deliberate illegibility of his monochrome text and background invites the viewer not just to accept but to find beauty in ambiguity. His sparkling loose particles, a waste byproduct of coal processing, transform grit from the ground into a fine art material–a not-so-subtle allusion to the title of the exhibition.

Cecily Brown’s One Touch of Venus (1999) strategically teases the viewer with ambiguous hedonistic imagery in her feminist reclamation of the nude Venus. She replaces the dichotomy of representation versus abstraction with a harmonious synthesis of both painting strategies to celebrate the specificities of women’s bodies and sexuality through an art historically significant allegorical subject. Brown’s painting juxtaposes Richard Prince’s Are You Kidding? (1988) in technique and tone. An example of his Monochromatic Jokes series, the punchy two-liner lands at the expense of the narrator’s wife. He leans into the provocative irony of screen printing a lowbrow, offensive joke onto a primed and stretched canvas.

Home to six of the eight exhibiting artists, New York City emerges as the underlying geographical context for GRIT. The intimate social web of communities across the city shine through the portraits of Martin Wong’s Lower East Side graffiti friends Lee Quiñones, Untitled (1989) and Angel Ortiz, Angelito (1997), and Elizabeth Peyton’s portraits of her collaborator, Piotr Uklanski (1996), and her assistant Ben in Haircut (Ben & Spencer) (2002).

Japan-based Yoshitomo Nara consumed the music and visual culture of New York in the 1990s and participated in exhibitions across the United States, Europe, and Asia throughout the decade. Paired with Wool’s 1992 word painting, which reads “DOG DEAD,” Nara’s Kaputt Pup King (1999) highlights the global reach of grunge and the shared angst of his American contemporaries.

The exhibition ends with Banksy’s Exclamation Rat (2003), an embodiment of the outcast rebellious spirit, which characterizes the 1990s. Radical and nonconformist, the anonymous Banksy and his spray-painted rats represent the unpolished dynamism of the decade and its vestiges in the early aughts.

GRIT: Graffiti, Grunge, and the 1990s will be on view by appointment only from September 19th to December 16th, 2024, at Level & Co. on 74th Street in the Upper East Side.

GRIT: Graffiti, Grunge, and the 1990s September 20 - December 16, 2024 30 East 74th Street By appointment only

PRESS Level & Co. press@levelandco.com