Tom McGrath (artist)
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Tom McGrath (born 1978, Milford, Connecticut) is an artist based in New York.
McGrath received his BFA from Cooper Union [1] in 2000 and his MFA from Columbia University [2] in 2002.
He has shown work in many exhibitions including “Choose Your Own Adventure” at LeRoy Neiman Centre for Print Studies [3] in New York, “The Triumph of Painting” at the Saatchi Gallery [4] in London, “After Matisse/Picasso” at P.S. 1 [5] in New York, and at Lia Rumma [6] in Naples. He is represented by Zach Feuer Gallery [7] in New York.
Tom McGrath makes paintings investigating movement and space via the motif of car journeys. His paintings take the viewpoint of a car passenger, his canvasses always focused on the surrounding landscape rather than any human protagonist. The paintings look at first like Impressionist-influenced landscapes – the paint is applied in a variety of ways to achieve many different effects and the end-results are quasi-realistic, perceptually skewed, very painterly images. However, what can be read as art historical playfulness is actually a manifestation of the artist’s desire to map out the spatial limits and oddities of movement. McGrath always makes his paintings slightly ‘wrong’ with regards to perspective as a way to demonstrate the overlooked machinations behind human perception – all is not what it seems. Basing his work on photo-collages using pictures of his own journeys, McGrath’s paintings carry a lot of the remnants of these constructed starting points; by using these images as a springboard, McGrath can successfully combine his fascination with perception and space, the cultural resonance of the American road trip and the state of contemporary painting.
