Beauty Reigns: A Baroque Sensibility in Recent Painting Ryan McGinness and Charles Burwell

Introduction by Rene Paul Barilleaux.
Text by Stephen Westfall, Lilly Wei, Rene Paul Barilleaux.

Beauty Reigns: A Baroque Sensibility in Recent Painting assembles the work of 13 emerging and mid-career abstract painters–Jose Alvarez, Kamrooz Aram, Charles Burwell, Annette Davidek, Fausto Fernandez, Nancy Lorenz, Ryan McGinness, Beatriz Milhazes, Jiha Moon, Paul Henry Ramirez, Rex Ray, Rosalyn Schwartz and Susan Chrysler White–whose art is characterized by high-key color, obsessive layering of surface imagery, repeated patterns, stylized motifs and a tension between melancholy and the sublime. It builds directly on Barilleaux’s award-winning exhibition and book New Image Sculpture, which examined how contemporary artists transform widely available, often non-art materials into fanciful replications of the ordinary. Beauty Reigns identifies a recent trend towards exoticism, exuberance and optimism.