Frederick Hayes: BUILDING AN EMPIRE

October 24 – December 6, 2009

Number 35 is pleased to present a new body of work by Frederick Hayes. In this exhibition, Hayes continues his exploration of a turbulent humanness that underlies themes of urban existence and the circumstance of being human and alive in an unpredictable world.

Working from images taken from TV, newspaper, the internet, magazines, his own photography and imagination, Hayes composes a series of small portraits. These works, inspired by Robert Colescott, builds upon the expressionistic figuration of the celebrated painter by further reducing the faces almost into abstract patterning. The work is frontal in its relationship (parallel to the picture plane) and makes a direct connection to the viewer. Shown in a tight grid, the faces comprise a silent yet expressive audience, a chorus of the masses.

The facades, a series of almost identical graphite drawings, echo the portraits in their reduced presentation. They remind the viewer of a building, but because they are without beginning and end, they can only represent the idea, the memory of something one vaguely remembers passing by. The cityscapes also reflect this idea, but have a more playful quality. His markings are indentations that erasers cannot remove, leaving behind a ghost of something that was once there. The squares, triangles, hexes and rectangles stacked together are only to recall an idea of a city; it could be anywhere in the world or a child’s work on a sandy beach.

Frederick Hayes (b. 1955, Atlanta) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He has exhibited at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco, and Triple Candie, New York among others.

“FREDERICK HAYES”, The New York Times, Roberta Smith, Friday, November 20, 2009. Download PDF.