Lui Shtini A Sawdust Feast

Press Release

Opens Friday, October 20, 2017, 6-8 PM Corbett vs. Dempsey is thrilled to present A Sawdust Feast, featuring new paintings and a new drawing by Lui Shtini. This is Shtini's second exhibition at the gallery. Born and raised in Kavaje, Albania, Shtini emigrated to the United States at the beginning of the 2000s, and he now lives and works in New York City. Over the course of the last two years, Shtini has set himself the ambitious goals of shifting his imagery and changing scale. His earlier works were centered on portrait-like forms, busts of imaginary beings at once abstract and concrete, with immaculate attention to the details of paint application. Each one of the small paintings a veritable primer on unorthodox techniques. In his new, large scale paintings, Shtini has adopted a new support – Dibond aluminum – and has complicated the near-symmetry of the portraits, introducing multiple organic forms into the framed field. Two or more forms are often locked in some agonistic, intimate, even perverse interaction, their surfaces sinewy or slick, pockmarked or fuzzy, toothed or hairy. The cropping of the image is equally important, providing additional tension and suggesting lurking presences outside the visible arena. All Shtini's wondrous attention to painting is still very much present, abetted by areas of looser application and other unforeseen delights. In his recent drawings, one example of which is included in the exhibition, Shtini explores similar images with appropriately different methods, investigating the specificity of charcoal and graphite as applied to these magnificently monstrous pictures. As John Yau suggests in his essay for the exhibition catalog: "...he has no set way of positioning his forms. Rather, every form he makes in a work is something he discovers through the application of his medium." A Sawdust Feast is accompanied by the aforementioned 52-page catalog with color reproductions and an essay by Yau.

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