Michael Phelan (artist)
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Michael Phelan (born 1968, Texas, United States) is an artist based in New York.
Phelan completed his B.F.A at Rhode Island School of Design in 1992.
His work has appeared in a number of exhibitions including "Spring rain on my roof begins to drum: Drips from the willow, petals from the plum" at Leo Koenig[1], New York, "Greater New York" at P.S. 1 [2] and "The Triumph of Painting" at the Saatchi Gallery [3], London. Phelan has exhibited internationally at galleries including Galerie Edward Mitterrand [4], Switzerland and Extra City Centre for Contemporary Art [5], Belgium.
Michael Phelan creates installations combining paintings and sculpture that evoke ingrained memories of American cultural history and the sanitized remnants of commoditised imported culture from more 'authentic' locations. Phelan questions the desire for, and process by which, cultural traits and practices are abstracted and turned into souvenirs which bear no intellectual resemblance to their origins. All this is conducted with a Modernist eye for the nuances and rhythms of Abstract Expressionist painting – for example, in his series of 'tie-die' paintings Phelan appropriates the target motif common to the work of Jasper Johns and Kenneth Noland, the Mod youth movement, and various eastern traditional craft practices, while the method of tie-die itself has particular resonance with the hippies of the 1960s and their contemporary wanna-be cousins. It is precisely this array of contexts that intrigues Phelan – the cultural cache of dislocated symbols and traits in contemporary history-lite American society.
[edit] External Links
[edit] References
- Leo Koenig Press Release for “Spring rain on my roof begins to drum”, 2002
- Michael Phelan – Saatchi Gallery Information on Phelan’s practice
