High Anxiety

Press Release

March 21 – April 21, 2019
Opening reception: Thursday, March 21 6-8PM

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to announce High Anxiety, Richard Bosman’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Since the early 1980’s, Bosman has painted tragicomic fictions of modern life tinged with frank melodrama and humor, marking him as a pivotal figure in the Neo-Expressionist movement. High Anxiety presents seminal works from the early 1980’s alongside the artist’s more recent paintings.

Anticipation and its resulting anxieties pulse through Bosman’s cinematic subject matter. Bosman’s characters, staged in psychological and tension-filled storylines, are rendered in representational styles familiar with various sectors of popular culture: TV detective series, mystery novels, film noir, and comic books. The artist’s evident brushwork renders these murder plots and high-stakes encounters with dramatic immediacy, each painting delivering a thrilling dose of action and suspense. For High Anxiety, Bosman plays with the affective possibilities of painting as a medium and narrative device, opening up space for imagined crimes, rapture, and humor to unfold.

In more recent work, Bosman’s dramas have shifted to the stress and minutiae of modern life, often gleaned from stock images online. Anonymous business men and women engage publicly and privately in close-cropped scenes. They pry open blinds, rifle through packed luggage, even moan in pain or ecstasy. In addition to these works from behind closed doors, the artist composed a series of figures trapped within thick torrents of rain. Soaked and sobbing, they are made more poignant by the seemingly blunt desperation in which Bosman has framed them.

Richard Bosman (Australian, born 1944 in Chennai, India) lives and works in Esopus, New York. He attended the Bryam Shaw School of Painting and Drawing, London, and the New York Studio School. His work has been shown at The British Museum, London; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Brooke Alexander Gallery, New York, Freddy, Harris, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; and the 41st Venice Biennale, among others. Bosman is a recipient of a 1994 Guggenheim Fellowship.