Details:
① Artwork:
Cave Painting
This painting depicts four figures on a solid red background. The scene showcases these figures engaged in a moment, busy in action. Occupying less than half of the canvas, they have been framed within a real space, the flat color beside them.
John Denniston II uses oil paint to improvise within realistic picture-making structures. By staging scenes of chaotic abstraction from classic formulas, he challenges the ideological implications founded in historic painting practices, opening within them a surreal scene of figural possibilities.
Specs:
③ Artist:
John Denniston II uses oil paint to improvise within realistic picture-making structures. By staging scenes of chaotic abstraction from classic formulas, he challenges the ideological implications founded in historic painting practices, opening within them a surreal scene of figural possibilities. In taking on the discourses of philosophy and anthropology with an artist’s introspection and imagination, he pressures the ability of paint to evoke the conceptual out of the formal, generates new commentaries, and lightens the weight of burdensome logic.
John Denniston II was born in 1999. He received his BFA in painting from Pratt Institute in 2022 and has taken intensive courses with The Art Digger Lab (2021), MICA (2016), Academy of Art University (2015), and Art Center College of Design (2013-2014).
He mounted a solo exhibition at Swivel Gallery (2024, 2022) and The Emerson (2022).
His work has been featured in group shows at Swivel (2024, 2022), Everyday Moonday Gallery (2023), New Collectors Gallery (2023), Strada Gallery (2023), Vardan Gallery (2023), Pratt Institute galleries (2022, 2021, 2020) and Gallery House (2019, 2021).
