Night Gallery is pleased to present 69, an exhibition of drawings and paintings by Aaron Wrinkle. Opening the afternoon of Saturday, January 23, it will be situated in Wrinkle’s mausoleum, located in the gallery parking lot. Wrinkle's paintings are rooted in familiar modernist compositions, yet often become nightmarish as intuitive and surrealist gestures emerge in response to the formal geometric structures. Psychosexual narratives and a sense of pathos underpin portraits of the artist engaging with other characters in experimental rituals, funerary rites and sex acts, in landscapes of collage and crude color palettes. The works on paper displayed alongside these paintings are sketchbook drawings and journal entries, including poems and lyrics, in which recurring themes and characters are developed.
Wrinkle's astrological sun sign is Cancer, the symbol for which rotates to the numeral 69. The artist learned of David Bowie’s recent death at the age of 69, while listening to Bowie’s album Lodger. These simultaneities led to the choice of the exhibition’s title.
Aaron Wrinkle (b. 1978) received his BFA from Kansas City Art Institute in 2004 and his MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2008. Aaron is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily in painting and sculpture. From 2008 to 2011 he ran the gallery Dan Graham, which he completed with a public conversation at Art Los Angeles Contemporary with the gallery’s namesake. In 2012 he curated a series of PST exhibitions on Cirrus Gallery’s archives with Jean Milant and wrote essays on the work of Paul and Damon McCarthy and Dan Graham for Geoff Tuck’s Notes on Looking. He has presented solo exhibitions in Kansas City and in Los Angeles, and has participated in numerous exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, Europe, and Japan. He has collaborated with Michael Decker in the duo Wrinkle/Decker and is currently collaborating with Raymond Pettibon on a fanzine. His work has been reviewed and featured in ArtForum, Art Journal, Artnet, Art Scene, Interview Magazine, LA Weekly, Modern Painters, The New York Times, Notes on Looking, Night Papers, and Phaidon Press.