EXPO Chicago

Hollis Taggart’s booth will feature the work of gallery artists Thomas Agrinier and Justine Otto, whose practices both reinvigorate the tradition of figurative painting. In contrast to much of figurative painting today that conveys figures at stasis, frozen in the space and time of the painting, Agrinier’s work depicts figures in mid-action and movement. His figures often feature distorted faces and bodies that seem to be pulverized and dissolving into the surrounding environment. Agrinier pursues a figuration that is imbued with a sense of heightened vitality that reflects the constant metamorphosis and inherent instability of our emotions and bodily experiences. Combining his painterly expressionistic style with the hard-edge, block-colored shapes and sly humor of cartoons, Agrinier aims for a figuration that seeks to make the viewer feel their own flesh more viscerally. Like Agrinier, Justine Otto offers a fresh reconfiguration of the longstanding genre of figurative painting. Culling inspiration from films and vintage photographs, Otto paints single figures and groups, immersed in enigmatic activities and rendered in striking palettes and deliquescing forms. Similarly to Agrinier who often models his figures on classic themes such as biblical scenes or Old Master paintings, Otto’s figures often nod to archetypes such as generals, lonely cowboys riding on the prairie, Marlboro men, and statesmen in their uniforms. Otto is drawn to these figures because they represent traditional symbols of power, which she is now able to “dissolve in abstract painting.” She bathes these figures in jewel-tones and renders them in narratives that seem to be anchored in no specific place or time. Both Agrinier and Otto experiment with the fluid boundary between abstraction and figuration, drawing out new possibilities for the co-existence of these two modes.

For more information on the gallery's booth presentation please contact us at +1 212.628.4000 or info@hollistaggart.com.