Scott Anderson: Biotech 2021

Scott Anderson

Biotech

Scott Anderson: Biotech

Sarah Diver

April 2020

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-of-consciousness 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

Duck Bone in Leg installed in Biotech at Denny Dimin Gallery, New York.

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.”

Thirteen 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 hyper-capitalism, 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 (2019; pl.3), 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; pl.10), 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; pl.2), 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 NeoDadaists, the gestural-verging-on-abstract 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

Top: Small and Large Swimmers with Mushrooms. 2019. Oil, ink, and flocking powder on canvas. 75 x 60 in/191 x 152 cm.

Bottom: Theory and Law. 2020. Oil, oil crayon, ink, colored pencil, sawdust, and gouache on canvas. 57 x 50 in/145 x 127 cm

and presents the 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 fallingapart-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; pl.12). While the cartoon-like undulating shapes threatening the center of this work could be seen as Philip Guston-gonewild, 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; pl.6) that outline strange plumbing, a network of bladders and elbows, weakly call out, “Am I rad, dude?” Similarly, in Small Gardener (2019; pl.9), 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 snot-figure, unceasing, grotesque, and somehow wanting. The works catalyze thought and become systems of representation unto themselves, like symbols from a 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 Portland, OR. She is currently working as the Research Associate for the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation. 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 continues to write creatively and is authoring a cookbook-memoir as well as short fiction works.

Plates

1. Tables and chairs , 2021 Oil on linen 40 x 40 in/101.6 x 101.6 cm

2. Lernaean Thumb Drive , 2020 Oil, sawdust, and ink on canvas 57 x 50 in/145 x 127 cm

3. Duck Bone in Leg , 2019 Oil, oil crayon, ink, and sawdust on canvas 42 x 35 in/107 x 89 cm

2. Amblyopioid Waltz , 2021 Oil on linen 40 x 40 in/101.6 x 101.6 cm

5. Drive-thru Salad , 2019 Oil, acrylic, ink, and graphite on canvas 57 x 50 in/145 x 127 cm

6. Several Rads , 2019 Oil, ink, and sawdust on canvas 44 x 48 in/112 x 122 cm

7. Bad Pietà , 2019 Oil, ink, and colored pencil on canvas 75 x 60 in/191 x 152 cm

8. Hatchback Mask , 2019 Oil and enamel on canvas 24 x 20 in/61 x 51 cm

9. Small Gardener , 2019 Oil and ink on canvas 24 x 20 in/61 x 51 cm

10. Small and Large Swimmers with Mushrooms , 2019 Oil, ink, and flocking powder on canvas 75 x 60 in/190.5 x 152.4 cm

11. Forensics Digest , 2019 Oil, oil crayon, ink, and sawdust on canvas 75 x 60 in/190.5 x 152.4 cm

12. Theory and Law , 2020 Oil, oil crayon, ink, colored pencil, sawdust, and gouache on canvas 57 x 50 in/145 x 127 cm

13. Mudroom and Garden , 2019 Oil, oil crayon, ink, and colored pencil on canvas 57 x 50 in/145 x 127 cm

SCOTT ANDERSON

Lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico

Born in 1973 in Urbana, Illinois

EDUCATION

2003 Masters of Fine Arts, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampagne

SOLO AND TWO-PERSON EXHIBITIONS

2021 Biotech, Denny Dimin Gallery, New York, NY

2020 Biotech, virtual exhibition, Denny Dimin Gallery

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

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, 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

1997 Bachelor of Fine Arts, Kansas State University

2009 Join or Die, Stux Gallery, New York, NY

2008 Rendezvous Point, Light and Sie Gallery, Dallas, TX 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

Two-person exhibition with Aaron Baker, Community College of Southern Nevada, Las Vegas, NV

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

2016 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, London, UK

Ducks: LA, Minotaur Projects, Los Angeles, CA

2014 Ducks, Greenpoint Terminal Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

Reverb II, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH

2013 The 10th Circle, Vast Space Projects, Henderson, NV 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

Always Nowadays, SCA Contemporary, Albuquerque, NM

2010 Underground Pop, Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY, Curator: David Pagel

Bunny Redux, Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, 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

SELECTED RESIDENCIES AND AWARDS

2015 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME

2006 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant

SELECTED PRESS AND PUBLICATIONS

2019 Slöör, Susanna, “A Life Among Things: ArtifactsNevven Gallery, Gothenburg,” Omkonst, Nov 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., Sep Johnson, Grant, “Scott Anderson at CES,” Artforum, May 2

Cultivating Instability, Cliff Dwellers, Chicago, IL 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

Homecoming, Epstein Gallery, Leawood, KS/Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, KS

Après moi, le deluge, Steve Kroner, FA Projects, London, UK

We Build the Worlds Inside Our Heads, Freight & Volume Gallery, New York, NY

2005 Strange Fictions, Tarble Art Center, Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, IL

2004 Architecture Untethered, Numark Gallery, Washington, D.C. (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 (Catalog)

Painting!, University Art Galleries, Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, MI (Catalog)

2002 Painting and Illustration, Luckman Gallery, California State University at L.A., Los Angeles, CA

Social Landscape, P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York, NY

Nubo Wave Map Space Bubble, University Galleries, Illinois State University, Normal, IL (Brochure)

2003 William and Dorothy Yeck Award

2001 Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship

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)

Scott Anderson in his studio in Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2021

2011 Beautiful/Decay, Book 6, “Future Perfect”, (image)

2010 Ernst, Eric, “Between Pop and Postmodern,” 27 East, East Hampton Press + Southampton Press, Sep 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, Sep 2 Droitcour, Brian, “Publish or Parrish,” Artforum, 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

Cook, Christopher, catalog essay, Revolucio, Stux Gallery, New York, NY

Artner, Alan G., Chicago Tribune, March 21 (image)

Beautiful/Decay, Issue Z, (image)

2008 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

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, 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., catalog essay, Mental Space, January New American Paintings, Volume #53, Fall, (image)

2004 Ellegood, Anne, catalog essay, Architecture Untethered, September

Wertz, Orion, exhibition essay, 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, Jan 24

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 Cyber-Landscape,” The C.A.C.A. Review, October, p. 3

Camper, Fred, “Imperfect Worlds,” Chicago Reader, April 11, pp. 26 – 27 (image)

Chomin, Linda Ann, “Post-Digital 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, Oct

Tysh, George, “Art 1010101010101010, Cranbrook’s ‘Post-Digital Painting’ boots up wild new worlds,” Metro Times, January 29

Colby, Joy Hakanson, “’Post-Digital 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

DiMichele, David, “Painting and Illustration at the Luckman Gallery,” Artweek, Dec 02/Jan 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, November-December, pp. 93-94

Spector, Buzz, essay from “Apocalypse Next Week” exhibition brochure, July (image)

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, Sep (image)

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

TEACHING

2015-present Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing, University of New Mexico College of Fine Arts, Albuquerque, NM

SELECTED COLLECTIONS

Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS

The Karpidas Collection, Dallas, TX

Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA

2009-2015 Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing, University of New Mexico College of Fine Arts, Albuquerque, NM

Raymond J. Learsy, Sharon, CT

The Columbus Metropolitan Library, Columbus, OH

Catalog © 2021 Denny Dimin Gallery

Text by Sarah Diver © 2021 Sarah Diver

Artwork by Scott Anderson © 2021 Scott Anderson

Cover:

Detail of Hatchback Mask , 2019

Oil and enamel on canvas 24 x 20 in/61 x 51 cm