Antwan Horfee
SCI-FRIED
March 23 – May 1, 2021
Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to announce it first solo exhibition with Paris-based artist, Antwan Horfee, on view in Los Angeles from March 23rd through May 1st, 2021.
Demonstrating a devotional reverence for cult-cinema and the craft of filmmaking, SCI-FRIED, an exhibition of Horfee’s new paintings, challenges the formal limitations of a painted surface. Horfee’s practice, paralleling the behind-the-scenes decisions made on a film set, aims at balancing multiple perspectives and manipulating illusory depth with the intervention of shadow, light, and color. Approaching each painting as a work of fan art, Horfee gives form to the desires of fan culture and the compulsion to emulate venerated media while paying homage to personal filmic inspirations ranging from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho to George Lucas’s THX1138.
Recontextualizing familiar scenes and figures, Horfee transmutes motion picture imagery into atmospheric painted landscapes inhabited by heroes, villains, and monsters presented, as if through a window, on planes extending beyond the frame of the composition. Expanding upon Horfee’s multidisciplinary practice, this process of appropriation and transformation reflects aspects of music sampling as the replicated motifs nod to the past and simultaneously look to the future through innovation.
Traversing between hazy color fields and airbrushed figuration, Horfee conducts painterly gestures as narrative guides bridging visual planes of varying depth and ushering spectators into invented alternate realities. The marked distinction delineated by Horfee’s contrasting application methods denote the diverse potential for image making and consider the multitude of possibilities for working without technical training. The works endeavor to push amateurism and fuel creative curiosity. Manifested from emotion, the collage-like forms generated through Horfee’s action painting reflect layers of aesthetic references including Japanese ukiyo-e, graffiti, comics, and painters spanning art history such as Peter Paul Rubens and Charline von Heyl. Horfee’s vivid strokes and graphic undulating forms, palpable reminders of each work’s material flatness, function as fabricated chimeras pulled from science-fiction and fantasy that serve as reminders of the power and joy of creation.
Antwan Horfee (b. 1983 in Paris, FR; lives and works in Paris, FR) studied Beaux-Arts de Paris. Horfee has presented solo exhibitions with Ruttkowski;68 in Paris; PLUS-ONE Gallery, Antwerp; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. His works have also been included in group exhibitions at the Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, Lyon; Galerie Derouillon, Paris; and the Michael Horbach Foundation, Cologne.