(Friday) Jimmy Wright at Fierman
Never trust a man who paints nothing but flowers: something else is going on, either in secret, in his past, or perhaps indeed hiding in plain sight in those beautiful damned flowers! With Jimmy Wright one wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be all three. Wright arrived in New York City in 1974 after a stint at the Art Institute of Chicago where he had painted subjects inspired by his devout Christian upbringing in Kentucky. In the Babylon of New York, however, Wright threw himself into the bacchanal of the pre-AIDS leather bar, sex club and bathhouse scene. His unabashed depictions of this milieu recall Toulouse Lautrec and George Grosz, as Fierman’s press release correctly observes- as well, perhaps, as the British watercolorist Edward Burra. Wright’s precious and reckless celebrations of a lost world are highly wrought in their brooding intensity and inked with gay abandon. DAVID COHEN
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