Edition Announcement #385 - Michelle Muldrow

Icon by Michelle Muldrow
8"x10" ($20) | 11"x14" ($50) | 16"x20" ($200) | 30"x40" ($2000)

Tuesday greetings, collectors, and the warmest of welcomes to those of you who are receiving your very first edition announcement after discovering 20x200 on the Today show yesterday morning. (There are lots of you!)

We are pleased and proud to be hosting Cathedrals of Desire, the NYC solo debut of the fabulously talented painter Michelle Muldrow at Jen Bekman Gallery. We're so looking forward to the opening reception next Friday, April 29th, from 6 to 8 p.m., and we're not the only ones! Her gorgeous paintings created quite a buzz when we showed them at the PULSE Contemporary Art Fair last month, selling out in a snap. Many of her would-be collectors marked their calendars for the event, and quite a few of them have eagerly inquired about available inventory ahead of time. Icon, Michelle's first 20x200 edition, is an archival pigment print based on an original painting that's included in the exhibition.

At its heart, Michelle's work is an exploration of the idea that consumerism has replaced religion as a social anchor in contemporary culture. The places and things she is depicting are so mundane that there is no doubt as to what they are as actual things. But, to some extent we've blinded ourselves to the meaning that we've invested in them. By placing manufactured landscapes and their contents in a religious/devotional/ecstatic framework, Michelle makes plain the uncomfortable truths of our consumer culture. Our cathedrals are big box stores and our icons are shopping carts.

Michelle's pursuit is a calculated one; surely she understands the futility of trying to imbue these barren, generic landscapes and the things in them with a depth of meaning on par with the foundations of religion and of God himself. But in attempting to do so, in a strange way, she underscores how all of it is an invention, a manifestation of our urge to make meaning out of what's unknowable.

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