Barnaby Furnas creates monumental images dripped, splashed and poured with a dark visceral red paint that suggests the bloody remnants of war. His creations are biblical in scale and intent, occasionally exceeding 30 feet in length. Born in 1973, his early artistic inclinations found him spray painting graffiti in the subway tunnels and rooftops of his native Philadelphia. His work blends this spectacular aesthetic with the traditions of Abstract Expressionism. To create his monumental Flood paintings, Furnas props and suspends his canvases to create sloped planes. Balanced on a scaffold over the work, Furnas then douses, flings and pours paint across the surface. Furnas selected a group of Flood paintings for this exhibition at MCA Denver and created a new work that he painted on-site in the gallery.
Barnaby Furnas will be the subject in a major survey exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2012. His work was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and in exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Zentrum Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai. He is represented by Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, Stuart Shave/Modern Art in London and Anthony Meier in San Francisco. Furnas lives and works in New York.
Sponsored in part by members of MCA Denver's Director's & President's Circles.
image: Barnaby Furnas. Untitled (Flood) (detail), 2007, urethane, dye and dispersed pigment on linen, 96 x 72 in (243.8 x 182.9 cm). Private Collection, Los Angeles.
