Opening Thursday, September 7, 2006
On view through Saturday, October 14

We are pleased to announce Frank Magnotta’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, which will debut a new body of 13 portrait drawings.

Collectively these drawings form a “rogues gallery” of different social archetypes – doctors, bankers and priests – that embody institutions that consistently infiltrate, and in some cases define, contemporary life: The pharmaceutical/health care industry, the bank and the church.

Each portrait is composed entirely from actual logos and institutional symbols appropriated from these three fields; each work is a composite of public signs that have been anthropomorphized. For example, The Predator is reminiscent of an early 20th century portrait of a Rockefeller-style robber baron, in fur and pince-nez glasses. The entire drawing is in fact an amalgamation of multiple logos for existing banks constructed into an elaborate composition and rendered in virtuosic, seductive technique. The brilliance of each work is a careful balance between the legibility of each drawing’s representation of a subject, and proximity to historical precedents, while engaging a subtle, yet grotesque satire.

Magnotta’s drawings give human form to abstract corporate identities that define much of contemporary daily experience. As such, they question the degree to which control over our own bodies and destinies is an illusion constructed by corporate culture and institutionalized religion.

…I had been thinking how ID (in the corporate sense) which is a pure form, can also be read as id (in the Freudian sense), and how maybe ID’s are created to touch the id. I think these portraits slip between both.
(Frank Magnotta, August 2006)

Frank Magnotta’s first show at Cohan and Leslie (2004) consisted of large-scale drawings of fictional architecture and landscapes created from corporate logos. Most of these drawings are currently in public museum collections. Magnotta’s work was subsequently included in MoMA/PS1’s 2005 exhibition “Greater New York”, and published in Vitamin D (Phaidon Press, 2005).

This exhibition will remain on view through Saturday, October 14 at 138 Tenth Avenue (between 18th and 19th Streets), Tuesday through Saturday from 10am to 6pm. For more information or images please call212-206-8710 or log on to www.cohanandleslie.com.

Frank Magnotta would like to thank The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc. and the New York Foundation for the Arts for their generous support.