Studio Artego is pleased to present Hydra, an exhibition of fifty paintings by Brooklyn based artist and musician Michael Rose. Composed from a decade’s worth of paintings that range from figuration to abstraction, Hydra is Rose’s first solo show with Studio Artego, and his second solo show in New York City.
Rose’s work engages with memories, alienation, humor, and the variation and range of emotional experience. In his paintings, sense organs emerge from a particulate haze, prismatic and atmospheric. The form is clear at times; in other moments it dissolves into its context, defined only by the thinnest film of skin pressing against the surface. What emerges is a kind of tension between the simultaneous permeability and isolation of the self and the body. Painted rapidly with oil paint on wood, masonite, canvas, linen and polyester that is often left un-stretched, the creative process is plainly unconcealed; the marks left in the margins, the hand-cut edge and spontaneous peripheral forms between paintings are part of the composition. Paint and procedures are allowed to blur and layer, resulting in an image that hovers somewhere between memory and amalgamation.
Rose holds an MFA in Fine Arts from The New School: Parsons (2020) and a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (2013). He was a resident artist in the RISD European Honors Program in Rome (2012). Rose has exhibited with The Untitled Space (2023), Studio Artego (2023), 28 Varick Ave (2023), Bendheim Gallery (2023), Field Projects (2022), Kellen Gallery (2021), 25 East Gallery (2019), Trestle Gallery (2014) New House (2013) and Circolo degli Artisti (2012). Rose has co-curated group exhibitions at 28 Varick Ave (2023) and New House (2013). Rose wrote and produced an album for MIDI, Phantasmagoria, which was released by ArpaViva Recordings in 2016. Rose is currently working on a second album under the name Michael the Painter (first single The Egg Song is out now). Selected performances include Purgatory, Brooklyn (2023), Firehouse, Worcester (2023), Never Ending Books, New Haven (2023), News Cafe, Providence (2023), Lily Pad, Cambridge (2023), Rubulad, Brooklyn (2022), and Pete’s Candy Store (2021).
