Scott Anderson
Biotech
DENNY DIMIN
GALLERY
39 LISPENARD STREET NEW YORK, NY 10013
PHONE: 212-226-6537
WWW.DENNYDIMINGALLERY.COM
EMAIL@DENNYDIMINGALLERY.COM
Catalog © 2020 Denny Dimin Gallery
Artworks © 2018-2020 Scott Anderson
Essay © 2020 Sarah Diver
Photograph Credit: Noah McLaurine
All rights reserved.
Cover: Small Gardener (detail). 2019. Oil and ink on canvas. 24 x 20 in/61 x 51 cm.
Previous page: Theory and Law (detail). 2020. Oil, oil crayon, ink, colored pencil, sawdust, and gouache on canvas. 57 x 50 in/145 x 127 cm.
Scott Anderson
Left: Small and Large Swimmers with Mushrooms (detail). 2019. Oil, ink, and flocking powder on canavas. 75 x 60 in/191 x 152 cm.Biotech DENNY DIMIN GALLERY NEW YORK
Scott Anderson: Biotech
Sarah Diver
It is easy to feel lost, and get lost, in Scott Anderson’s paintings. The decaying body parts, fleshy amorphous limbs, and melting balloon-like shapes swim through bright blues, pulsating greens, and textured yellows. Each canvas – a “weird membrane,” as the artist calls it – becomes flypaper for the detritus of art history, the artist’s subconscious, and an endless doubling of the viewer’s own interpretation. The paintings are portals between interiority and exteriority: loudly questioning what it means to be a painting, both image and object, in the present world.
The sensation of looking at one of Scott Anderson’s paintings can feel akin to peering into an anxious mind made embarrassingly real and public, as if the interior contents of someone’s brain were thrown from buckets onto a wall. Each of Anderson’s paintings begins as a drawing sketched out in “fast” media, like colored pencil, pastel, crayon, or pen. This allows the artist a liberty in generating each drawing almost akin to stream-ofconsciousness writing. The drawings become maps for Anderson’s paintings; as he builds each canvas, he edits, refines, and plays with color, material, and composition as a way of processing his own mindset concurrent with the moment of the drawing. The paintings become a way of interrogating the rawness and intimacy of the artist’s own psychology, an impulse both specific to Anderson’s upbringing and all-encompassing and objective through its translation to painting.
Scott Anderson was born in Illinois into a highly conservative Evangelical Christian family and spent his formative years in the Midwest. The “romance,” as he calls it, around these religious ideologies always intrigued him, as Evangelical Christianity emphasizes emotional growth and transcendence through the confession and forgiveness of sin. While Anderson moved away and eventually disavowed his religious upbringing, the artist has often described his work in terms of an “agnosticism.”
As with agnostic thought, divinity is neither absent nor present, but simply unknowable, and with each painting, there exists both a rationalized dismantling of Anderson’s own psyche and a hopeful questioning of the possibilities within the present reality and within painting as a object in the world. In other words, a battle between tangible
emotions and rational thought made bare on the canvas through the lexicon of painting. As Anderson has said, his works are both “images of the things, and are the things themselves.”
Six paintings comprise this exhibition titled Biotech. “Bio-” presupposes a wide variety of etymological meanings – biology, symbiosis, bioluminescence. All related to systems and bodies, cells and processes that move and make our world alive. “Tech” is the antidote to the dynamism, aliveness of “bio” and comes from the Greek word for artistry, art, and skill, techni (τέχνη). While connotatively many might associate “biotech” with the sleek machinations of start-ups, robotics, and hypercapitalism, the word in its literal sense could perhaps be understood as a stand-in for the act of painting, where the human body translates thought through the material technology of paint on canvas. More broadly, however, technology (the “tech” of “biotech”) has become a truly blanket term to describe so much of what makes up contemporary social interactions, the physical built world, and even the state of the economy: namely, thousands of machines that have been finely tuned to enact specific roles within the world, and by now, dictate human experience. As technology becomes further refined through human skill and innovation, so do the methods of finer and finer control for the “bio” of our world, the manipulation and surveillance of bodies in time and space. This is where the paintings of Scott Anderson live, inside the friction between the representational and the abstract, between now and then, between bodies and society. Between inside and outside the mind. Between the organic and the manmade. In Duck Bone in Leg
Left: Duck Bone in Leg 2019. Oil, oil crayon, ink, and sawdust on canvas. 42 x 35 in/107 x 89 cm.
Right: Small and Large Swimmers with Mushrooms. 2019. Oil, ink, and flocking powder on canvas. 75 x 60 in/191 x 152 cm.
(2019), a muddy taupe-colored zigzag runs through a prone yellow mass with a bloody colored exposed ribcage or vein structure, and we gaze upon the painting as if examining an open-heart surgery. Is the patient diseased? Is the bone connected to the flesh? Do the vital organs jolt in a defiant rhythm of life? Or likewise, in Small and Large Swimmers with Mushrooms (2019), anxious faces become confused with the sprouting spores of many mushrooms, all emerging from an oxblood sea. Will the fungus devour the swimmers? Or if they survive, will they ever be the same? Consider the myth of the Lernaean Hydra, a monster whose many heads, once severed, would immediately grow back to take its place. A grey, seated figure’s chest explodes with body parts, a gory shadow to its left and something like a headless nude near a window
to its right; the body replicated and replaced over and over again in Anderson’s Lernaean Thumb Drive (2020), an agnostic questioning of the limits of data, of the self, of the body reified through an infinite groping of color and extremities.
One could call upon past artists and historical moments to understand certain impulses within the works: the associative collage-like elements of Rauschenberg and the Neo-Dadaists, the gestural-verging-onabstract renderings of the human form from German Expressionists, or the bright synthetic colors from Pop artists. Yet, these works neither pay homage to these historical precedents nor abandon them completely. Instead, each of Anderson’s paintings asks sincerely what one can make of painting’s history and presents the
Lernaean Thumb Drive. 2020. Oil, sawdust, and ink on canvas. 57 x 50 in/145 x 127 cm
Left: Theory and Law. 2020. Oil, oil crayon, ink, colored pencil, sawdust, and gouache on canvas. 57 x 50 in/145 x 127 cm.
Right: Several Rads. 2019. Oil, ink, and sawdust on canvas. 44 x 48 in/112 x 122 cm.
struggle between object and subject, image and language, in real time. The paintings question themselves through the juxtaposition and slippage between the different recognizable elements, simultaneously flattening and exploding the canon. They ask, “What do you make of me and my falling-apart-ness? Who or what am I?” The grasping burnt flesh of a Matisse-like figure surrounds a cacophony of concentric oranges, blacks, greens, and yellows in Theory and Law (2020). While the cartoonlike undulating shapes threatening the center of this work could be seen as Philip Guston-gone-wild, the chaos tearing and collapsing the forms onto themselves cries for “theory!” and “law!” as opposed to “history!” to make sense of the turmoil inherent to the scene. The weathered synthetic purples and battered blacks of Several Rads
(2019) that outline strange plumbing, a network of bladders and elbows, weakly call out, “Am I rad, dude?” Similarly, in Small Gardener (2019), a snot-colored slumping mass pokes and prods in the dark as oozing bladders and cryptic crinkled miniatures invade from the flanks. One could imagine seeing the little gardener with X-ray vision, and being shocked to discover Polykleitos’ Doryphoros, leaning with contraposto, lurking just beneath the surface, crusted over with puss or barnacles. Yet, no matter what historical ephemera one might cast onto this image, any historicizing inclination rises solely from the viewer’s bodily response to the crusty snotfigure, unceasing, grotesque, and somehow wanting. The works catalyze thought and become systems of representation unto themselves, like symbols from a
Right: Small Gardener. 2019. Oil and ink on canvas. 24 x 20 in/61 x 51 cm.
visual language wrought through their own history. Coronavirus (COVID-19) now pours onto this broken world like water in a riverbed, exposing the faultlines, cracks, and inconsistencies that were always present in society but now stand in high relief. It threatens to break it all open. At the core of the collective fear and potential for suffering in this pandemic is the human body – the locus of grief, a litmus test, a vehicle of both safety and danger. And while the paintings in this exhibition predate the outbreak of the virus, Anderson uses the complete lexicon of painting’s material and connotative potential to display this vulnerable and ugly truth about the human body felt so poignantly today across the globe.
Sarah Diver is an emerging writer and curator located in New York, NY. During her tenure as part the curatorial staff at Storm King Art Center between 2016 and 2020, she helped realize several major outdoor exhibitions, including artists like Mark Dion, David Smith, Jean Shin, Elaine Cameron-Weir, and Heather Hart. In 2015, she curated an exhibition on contemporary indigenous printmakers at the International Print Center New York. She received her MA in Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies from Columbia University in 2016, and her BA in art history, studio art, and chemistry from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2013. She is currently writing a cookbook-memoir.
Plates
Previous page: Lernaean Thumb Drive (detail). 2020.
Lernaean Thumb Drive, 2020
Oil, sawdust, and ink on canvas
57 x 50 in/145 x 127 cm
Theory and Law, 2020
Oil, oil crayon, ink, colored pencil, sawdust, and gouache on canvas
57 x 50 in/145 x 127 cm
Duck Bone in Leg, 2019
Oil, oil crayon, ink, and sawdust on canvas
42 x 35 in/107 x 89 cm
Small and Large Swimmers with Mushrooms, 2019
Oil, ink, and flocking powder on canvas
75 x 60 in/191 x 152 cm
Crabwalk, 2019
Acylic and oil on canvas
24 x 20 in/61 x 51 cm
Bad Pietà, 2019
Oil, ink, and colored pencil on canvas
75 x 60 in/191 x 152 cm
Hatchback Mask, 2019 Oil and enamel on canvas
24 x 20 in/61 x 51 cm
Forensics Digest, 2019
Oil, oil crayon, ink, and sawdust on canvas
75 x 60 in/191 x 152 cm
Mudroom and Garden, 2019
Oil, oil crayon, ink, and colored pencil on canvas
57 x 50 in/145 x 127 cm
Small Gardener, 2019
Oil and ink on canvas
24 x 20 in/61 x 51 cm
Drive-thru Salad, 2019
Oil, acrylic, ink, and graphite on canvas
57 x 50 in/145 x 127 cm
Several Rads, 2019
Oil, ink, and sawdust on canvas.
44 x 48 in/112 x 122 cm
Green Uvula, 2019
Oil, acrylic, and ink on canvas
24 x 20 in/61 x 51 cm
Country Song, 2018
Oil, oil crayon, and ink on canvas
24 x 20 in/61 x 51 cm
Duck Bone in Leg (detail).
2019.
Oil, oil crayon, ink, and sawdust on canvas.42 x 35 in/107 x 89 cm.
Curriculum Vitae
Education
2015
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture
2003
Masters of Fine Arts, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne
1997
Bachelor of Fine Arts, Kansas State University
Solo and Two-Person Exhibitions
2020
Biotech, Denny Dimin Gallery, New York, NY
2018
Streaming by Lamp and by Fire, Denny Gallery, New York, NY
2017
Lovers and Thinkers, Galerie Richard, Paris
2016
On the Nose, (two person with Austin Eddy), Denny Gallery, New York, NY
Supper Club, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS
Supper Club, CES Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
UNTITLED. Art Fair, with Galerie Richard, Miami, FL
2015
Wiseguys, CES Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Kansas, with David Leigh, Philspace, Santa Fe, NM
2013
Future Perfect Tense, with Orion Wertz, Biggin Gallery, Auburn University, Auburn, AL
2009
Join or Die, Stux Gallery, New York, NY (Catalog)
2008
Rendezvous Point, Light and Sie Gallery, Dallas, TX (Catalog)
Misiisto, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL
2007
Guru, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Leipzig, Germany
2005
Re Krei, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL
Aneksi, Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
2004
Neo Pejzago, Galerie Jean-Luc and Takako Richard, Paris, France (Catalog)
2003
12x12, New Artists
New Work, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL
Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL
Miami University of Ohio, Oxford, OH
2001
Esperanto for Forage, Peter Miller Gallery, Chicago, IL
Selected Group Exhibitions
2019
UNTITLED, Art. Miami
Beach, Denny Dimin Gallery, Miami, FL
Artifacts, Nevven Gallery, Gothenberg, Sweden
Drinking the Reflection, Russo
Lee Gallery, Portland, OR
30 Ans, Galerie Richard, Paris
2018
Gocha, Galerie Richard, Paris
NADA New York, with Rod Barton Gallery, New York, NY
2017
Painting in due time, Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, NY
The Wild West, Galerie Richard, New York, NY
2016
How High?, Left Field Gallery, San Luis Obispo, CA
Phantom Limb, Nazarian Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Alcove Show, New Mexico
Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM
2015
Inside/Outside, Common Street Arts, Waterville, ME, Curator: Michelle Grabner
Fantasy of Representation,
Beers of London, London, UK, Curator: Andrew
Selgado
Ducks:LA, Minotaur Projects, Los Angeles, CA, Curator: Ryan Travis Christian
2014
Ducks, Greenpoint Terminal Gallery, Brooklyn, NY,
Curator: Ryan Travis Christian
Reverb II, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH
2013
The 10th Circle, Vast Space Projects, Henderson, NV, Curator: David Pagel
New Surrealism, Mirus Gallery, San Francisco, CA
Reverb: Current Abstraction in Painting, University of Northern Iowa Gallery of Art, Cedar Falls, IA
2011
Streams of Consciousness, Salina Art Center, Salina, KS, Curator: Christopher Cook
Always Nowadays, SCA
Contemporary, Albuquerque, NM, Curators: Larry Bob
Phillips, and Karl Hoffman
2010
Underground Pop, Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY, Curator: David Pagel
(Catalog)
Bunny Redux, Warhol
Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, Curator: Aaron Baker
Cut, Shuffle, Draw, Columbus State University Galleries, Columbus, GA
Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco, CA
Tethered to My World, Highland Park Art Center, Highland Park, IL, Curator: Phyllis Bramson
2010+1 Young Painters: The Miami University’s 21st Century Painting Collection, Heistand Galleries, Miami University of Ohio, Oxford, OH
2009
Low Blow, Stux Gallery, New York, NY
Beautiful/Decay A to Z, Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Landscape Affected, Haggerty University Gallery, University of Dallas, Dallas, TX
2008
Future Tense: Reshaping the Landscape, Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY, Curators: Dede Young and Avis Larson
Wild Kingdom, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS
Wintergarten, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Berlin, Germany West, Wester, Westest, Fecalface Dot Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Curator: Ryan
Christian
Apocalypse Yesterday, Claremont Graduate University, Los Angeles, CA, Curator: David Pagel
Cultivating Instability, Cliff Dwellers, Chicago, IL, Curator: Iain Muirhead New Work From Chicago, Road Agent Gallery, Dallas, TX
2007
Me and My Katamari, Lisa Boyle Gallery, Chicago, IL
2006
Mutiny!, Happy Lion Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Curator: David Hunt
Homecoming, Epstein Gallery, Leawood, KS/Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, KS, Curators: Bruce Hartman and Kent Smith
Après moi, le deluge, exhibition with Angelina Gualdoni, Adam Civanovic, Steve Kroner, FA Projects,
London, U.K.
We Build the Worlds Inside Our Heads, Freight & Volume Gallery, New York, NY 2005
Strange Fictions, Tarble Art Center, Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, IL, Curator: Chris Kahler. (Brochure) 2004
Architecture Untethered, Numark Gallery, Washington, D.C. (Brochure)
Two-person exhibition with Aaron Baker, Community College of Southern Nevada, Las Vegas, NV (Brochure)
The Babble of Towers, Columbus State University, Columbus, GA, Curator: Orion Wertz. (Brochure)
Mental Space, Wendy Cooper Gallery, Madison, Wisconsin. Curator: JJ Murphy 2003
Post-Digital Painting,
Cranbrook Art Museum, Cranbrook Academy, Bloomfield Hills, MI. Curator: Joe Houston. (Catalog)
Painting!, University Art Galleries, Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, MI. Curator: Julia Morrisroe. (Catalog)
2002
Painting and Illustration, Luckman Gallery, California State University at L.A., Los Angeles, CA.
Curator: Adam Ross Social Landscape, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York, NY.
Nubo Wave Map Space Bubble, University Galleries, Illinois State University, Normal, IL.
Curator: Barry Blinderman. (Brochure)
Press and Publications
2019
Slöör, Susanna, “A Life Among Things: ArtifactsNevven Gallery, Gothenburg,” Omkonst, November 19
2018
Nafziger, Christina, “Love and devotion, over and over again by Scott Anderson,” Art Maze Magazine, Autumn Edition, issue 9
McMahon, Katherine, “A Tour of NADA New York 2018,”
ARTnews, March 8
2016
Olivant, David, “Scott Anderson: “Supper Club” at Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art,” art ltd.,
September
Johnson, Grant, “Scott Anderson at CES,” Artforum. com, May 2
Pagel, David, “In Scott Anderson’s ‘Supper Club’ Paintings, Pretty Isn’t the Point,” Los Angeles Times, April 14 (image)
2015
Grabner, Michelle, essay for “Inside/Outside,” Common Street Arts, Waterville, ME, July
2013
Crest, Russ, “Made With Color Presents: Scott Anderson’s Paintings Walk The Fine Line Between Abstraction And Representation,” Beautiful/ Decay, June 18
Pagel, David, “Dystopian Abstraction,” Art Pulse Magazine, No. 17, Vol. 5, (image)
2011
Beautiful/Decay, Book 6, “Future Perfect”, (image)
2010
Ernst, Eric, “Between Pop and Postmodern,” 27 East, East Hampton Press + Southampton Press, September 27
Park, Steve, “No Soup Cans in This Pop Art,” Newsday Landes, Jennifer, “Pop Goes Underground,” The East Hampton Star, December 31
Johnson, Ken, “The Allure of the Homespun in the Maw of the Digital Age,” The New York Times.com, September 2 Droitcour, Brian, “Publish or
Parrish,” Artforum.com, Scene and Heard, August 22
The Wolf Magazine for New Poetry, artist in residence, issue no. 23, June
Wolff, Rachel, “Pop Goes Mighty Mouse,” ARTnews, Summer, p.33
2008
Genocchio, Benjamin, “Today’s Landscapes, Tomorrow’s Dystopia,” The New York Times, June 1
Joyce, Julie, catalog essay, Light and Sie Gallery, Dallas, TX
Cook, Christopher, catalog essay for Revolucio, on the occasion of Join or Die, Stux Gallery, New York, NY
Artner, Alan G., Chicago Tribune, March 21 (image) Beautiful/Decay, Issue Z, (image)
Hannum, Terence, interview in Beautiful/Decay, issue “X,” pp. 44-53 (images and cover image)
2007
Bon Magazine, “Young Masters,” Fall, pp. 57, 60, 64, (images)
2005
Pagel, David, “Dramatic in any language,” Los Angeles Times, April 8 (image)
“What is the Meaning of it
All?,” Playboy Magazine, May, pp. 64-65 (image)
2004
Biro, Matthew, Contemporary, issue #69, p.77
Green, Tyler, art blog entry, Mondernartnotes.com, October
Dawson, Jessica, “Design and Structure in 3-D,” The Washington Post, Thursday, October 21
Mouth to Mouth, “Word for Word,” collaborative interview with Aaron Baker, Winter, pp. 15-21(image)
Murphy, J.J., essay accompanying “Mental Space” exhibition, January New American Paintings, Volume #53, Fall, (image)
Ellegood, Anne, essay for “Architecture Untethered” exhibition, September Wertz, Orion, exhibition brochure essay from “The Babbel of Towers”, October Pagel, David, catalog essay, Galerie Jean-Luc and Takako Richard, Paris France 2003
Artner, Alan G., “Scott Anderson’s Odd Beauty,” Chicago Tribune, April 18 (image)
Azizian, Carol, “Cranbrook exhibit driven by technology,” Flint Journal, January 3
Jones, Richard O, “Future looks bright for digital painting,” Journal News, Hamilton, Ohio, January 24 (image)
Haddad, Natalie, “Digital Simulation,” Real Detroit Weekly, March 12-18
Knight, Gregory and Silverman, Lanny, essay for exhibition at Chicago Cultural Center, September
Moffett, Nancy, “30 and
Below,” Chicago Sun-Times, March 29
Brunetti, John, “Scott Anderson and CyberLandscape,” The C.A.C.A. Review, October, p. 3 Camper, Fred, “Imperfect Worlds,” Chicago Reader, April 11, pp. 26 – 27 (image) Chomin, Linda Ann, “PostDigital exhibit captures painting ‘of the moment’,” Observer & Eccentric, March 6 Blinderman, Barry, “Painting in the Digital Age,” essay for 4th Annual Miami University Young Painters exhibition, January
Cohen, Keri Guten, “Artists use technology in paintings,” Detroit Free Press, January 5 Spector, Buzz, catalog essay from “Painting!,” Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, MI, October (cover image)
Tysh, George, “Art 1010101010101010, Cranbrook’s ‘Post-Digital Painting’ boots up wild new worlds,” Metro Times, January 29
Colby, Joy Hakanson, “’PostDigital Painting’ pumps new technology into aging art form.” Detroit News, January 30
Houston, Joe, essay from “Post-Digital Painting” exhibition catalog, pp. 11-13, (image)
Farstad, Julie, Mouth to Mouth, Spring, pp. 43-44 (image)
DiMichele, David, “Painting and Illustration at the Luckman Gallery,” Artweek, December 02/January 03 2002
Ross, Adam, essay accompanying the exhibition, “Painting and Illustration,” September
Finch, Leah, “Scott Anderson”, New Art Examiner, March-April, pp. 78-79 (image)
Blinderman, Barry, essay from “Nubo Wave Map Space Bubble,” brochure, January (image) 2001
Neuhoff, Tony, “Apocalypse Next Week,” New Art Examiner, NovemberDecember, pp. 93-94
Spector, Buzz, essay from “Apocalypse Next Week” exhibition brochure, July Champaign-Urbana Octopus, “Today in Eight Parts graces I-Space,” March 16-22 (image)
Champaign-Urbana Octopus, April 13-19 (cover image)
New American Paintings, Volume #35, September
Finch, Leah, “Apocalypse Next Week,” Dialogue, September, pp. 31-35 (cover image)
Artner, Alan G., “Gallery Season Guide,” Chicago Tribune, September
Artner, Alan G., “Visions by four. The theme is apocalypse, the art, Inventive.” Chicago Tribune, August 10, p.32
