The good thief

Nathan Redwood

November 16 - January 11, 2025

Los Angeles, CA – CMAY Gallery presents “The Good Thief,” an exhibition of new paintings by Nathan Redwood. This show marks the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, featuring an engaging collection of smaller works on paper in the front gallery and large, dynamic paintings in the expansive back space.

Redwood is known for enigmatic non-narrative painting that probes abstract languages and representational motifs, trapping them in a shared dialogue. His surreal paintings often utilize quotidian objects and found materials to activate a whimsical cast of surrogate-human characters described as Seussian or Guston-esque. Redwood’s epic mise-en-scène evokes both chaotic and romantic visions.

His newest work pushes his figures further, specifically into narrative and human territory, foregoing his previous hybrids for a more realistic approach. In this exhibition, Redwood employs figuration to lend mystery and meaning to visual art, reinterpreting art itself and his personal experiences of the past few years. Several of the paintings prominently feature objects that have been lifted from art history. In the aptly titled painting “The Good Thief,” one such object is H.C. Westermann’s 1964 conceptual art piece Clean Air. Westermann’s sculpture, composed of three nested vitrines, is reincarnated here as the last remaining source of clean air in a hypothetical catastrophic moment that was meant to evoke the cloistered experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. The actors in the twilight scene are the masked thieves, sharing a straw to suck the clean air out of the sculpture; but they’re “good” thieves, too, because they tenderly approach the object and know its life-sustaining potential. The painting proposes a more nuanced path to appropriation in contemporary art today.

In the painting “An Education,” Redwood presents an allegory of art, and the artist’s personal understanding of contemporary painting. On the left side is a realistically painted figure that stands for representation in painting. From left to right, in the form of four sequentially devolving figures, it breaks down realism into geometric abstraction— the fourth figure, a narrowing plank-like form, is entirely abstract. The scene calls to mind the tradition of storytelling around a fire, and parallels Redwood’s desire to reengage traditions of painting while inventing original work. Each painting’s narrative unfolds through fluent brushwork of either art historical or personal inventory, challenging viewers to enjoy these subtleties.

Nathan Redwood earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005, followed by residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. He  moved to Los Angeles in late 2005. He has exhibited at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, California, the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York, TENT Centrum Beeldende Kunst, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, California, the Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, California, the Rollins Arts Museum, Winter Park, Florida, the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum, Mesa,  Arizona, and he is currently showing at the Tucson Museum of Art in Tucson, Arizona.

Nathan Redwood is in the permanent collections of the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, California, the Dallas Price Collection, Santa Monica, California, the Plancius Collection, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, the Rollins Arts Museum, Winter Park, Florida, the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum, Mesa, Arizona, and the Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona.