JDJ is thrilled to present our debut solo presentation with Russell Tyler.

This presentation pairs two seemingly dissonant styles of Tyler’s recent paintings, connected by their highly tactile, rich impasto brushwork and an astute consideration of deep space.

Acidic palettes reference the colors from the artist’s early life in the tropical landscapes of Hawaii.

Tyler frequently employs a brightly-hued border around his paintings: this “frame” serves as a kind of visual enhancement or underline to the painting’s interior.

Tyler’s gestural abstractions are open-ended: one can see earthly landscapes, still life arrangements, and the cosmos within their structure.

A variety of expressive marks rendered in impasto oil paint seem to float on a different plane, either imploding or exploding in their space: a bouquet of forms and lines coming together or bursting apart.

Tyler’s geometric paintings are highly structured, yet sensuous and tactile, with expressively applied oil paint. The paintings possess something immaterial: colors seem as though they could break through the boundaries imposed by their forms.

Both of Tyler’s painting series on view here invite a playful dialogue with several dueling moments from the history of painterly abstraction: Minimalism, Concrete Art, and Expressionism. Through extended looking, each work reveals its sensitively rendered structure and gestural exuberance.

Russell Tyler (b. 1981 in Summertown, TN, lives and works in Newburgh, NY) received his BFA from Concordia University and his MFA from the Pratt Institute. His work is represented in a number of public collections, including the Kadist Art Foundation, Credit Suisse, New York Presbyterian, Carmen & Luis Bassat Foundation among others. Previous exhibitions include The Hole (New York, NY), Mindy Solomon Gallery (Miami, FL), Louis Buhl & Co. (Detroit, MI), Denny Dimin Gallery (New York, NY), Andersen’s Contemporary (Copenhagen, Denmark), Richard Heller (Los Angeles, CA), Ribordy Contemporary (Geneva, Switzerland), Galerie Bernard Ceysson (Paris, France), among others. Tyler has been included in group exhibitions at institutions and galleries including Savannah College of Art and Design (Savannah, GA), the Torrance Art Museum (Torrance, CA), New Britain Museum of American Art (New Britain, CT), among others. Reviews and features on his work have been written in Artforum, Hyperallergic, Modern Painters, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, NY Arts Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail and Le Monde.