MICHAEL CLINE
Back Steps
March 10 – March 22, 2021
Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to announce, Back Steps, a project with New York-based artist, Michael Cline, on view in Los Angeles from March 10th through March 24th, 2021.
With a series of eight new works, Cline’s paintings traverse planes of invented space formed from composites of reality and fiction. These ambiguous painted settings, devoid of any regional or time specific signifiers, function as liminal displays exhibiting still lifes curated from collections of assorted visual material ranging from pottery and statuary to sketches, prints, potted plants and even captive wildlife. The contents displayed within Cline’s paintings often directly reflect the real-life possessions that make up the artist’s physical world. Separating his belongings from materiality, Cline archives their painted counterparts alongside items pulled from memory and imagination to achieve intimate cabinets of curiosity bathed in soft, pale green light underscoring this departure from corporeality in conjunction with manipulated senses of perspective and scale.
Memories of Saturday afternoons spent in his grandmother’s Florida home, a treasure chest of fascination for Cline, provide the foundations for his recent body of work. Recollections of devotional altars featuring religious ephemera tied to his grandmother’s syncretic spiritual practices juxtaposed with collected curios, acquired memorabilia, souvenirs from travel, and family photographs inform Cline’s approach to cataloging and deriving meaning from the arrangement of objects. Grounded in storytelling and narrative possibility, Cline’s primarily figurative painting practice manifests the artist’s accumulated goods and sweeping personal interests as coded tableaus revealing external cyphers into an expansive internal psyche.
Michael Cline (b. 1973 in Cape Canaveral, FL; lives and works in New York, NY) completed his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his BA at the University of North Florida. Cline has presented solo exhibitions with Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago; David Kordansky, Los Angeles; Marc Jancou Contemporary, New York; and Daniel Reich Gallery, New York. His works have also been included in group exhibitions organized by the Parrish Art Museum, New York; Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Roma, Rome; Deste Foundation, Athens; David Zwirner, New York; Lehmann Maupin, New York; and Saatchi Gallery, London. Cline’s paintings are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; François Pinault Foundation, Venice; and the Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania.