Andrew Falkowski: Flat Earth
January 28 – March 3, 2018
Reception: Sunday, January 28, 3 ‐ 6pm
Artist’s Talk: Andrew Falkowski with Terry R. Myers, Saturday February 24th at 3pm
Curated by Anne Harris
Andrew Falkowski, “Read Between the Lines,” 2017, Acrylic, Modeling Paste, 34” x 23”
Click Link to download a PDF of the exhibition essay by Anne Harris: Andrew Falkowski Two Paintings and Fake Tape Essay
The RAC is pleased to present Andrew Falkowski’s solo exhibition Flat Earth.
Andrew Falkowski’s newest text paintings riff off pop-culture sources culled from junk mail, commercial packaging, magazines, art history and punk songs. In reproduction, this work reads as smart and wry — a sleek visual stylization of audio aggression. A sustained look at the actual paintings reveals a layered conversation. Meaning is found through the intersection of paint, image and language, combined with playfully loving swats at painted illusion.
This ranges from trompe l’oeil to replication. For example, duct tape: Falkowski seems to use it, but it’s really acrylic paint. He’s cast this from a mold and then applied it to the surface of his painting. The illusion is so convincing that we see none – the cast tape looks just like duct tape. Once we understand the wit behind the process, the experience of the painting flips. The look of jury-rigging becomes painstaking craft. First impressions dissolve into contradictions. Fiction is fact; fact is fiction. In the end, we have work that extends the inherent irony in painting: that surface meaning differs from deeper meaning.
Art doesn’t transform. It just plain forms. – Roy Lichtenstein
–Anne Harris
About the Artist
Andrew Falkowski is a Chicago-based painter. His work has been exhibited at venues ranging from Rosamund Felsen Gallery (Los Angeles), to Mixed Greens Gallery (NYC), to Chicago galleries such as Andrew Rafacz, Kavi Gupta and Julius Caesar, as well as The Suburban (both Oak Park and Milwaukee). Falkowski’s work has been discussed and reviewed in such publications as Time Out, Chicago Art Magazine, and Artforum.com. His art criticism and essays have appeared in publications such as New Art Examiner, Cakewalk Magazine and Shifter Magazine. He is now currently a contributing writer to Chicago Artist Writers and New City Art Online. Falkowski is Assistant Professor in the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as Core Faculty in SAIC’s Low Residency MFA program.