Caren Golden Fine Art is pleased to present “Based on a True Story,” Andrew Sendor’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Through a series of bizarre hypothetical scenarios Sendor embarks on a self-referential investigation of the recent history of art. Each canvas features an interior exhibition space where videos, paintings, photographs and, absurdly, human-beings-as-art, reside. “Based on A True Story” speculates why, when no medium or subject is too outrageous, the site of a museum remains sacred. What would happen if taxidermied humans were put on display as art? Would this represent a vanguard act of appropriation, or an unspeakable taboo? And if it is indeed one of the last in art, then what does a painted representation of the taboo convey?
Sendor considers the historical function of the act of painting as a mimetic device, a means of expression, and an agent of desire. While his recent work is born of difficult questions and complex ideas, Sendor’s provocative imagery evokes a more visceral reaction from the viewer. Exquisitely rendered and improbably seductive, these disquieting compositions thrive on the same attraction-versus-repulsion dynamic that activated the work of such painters as Goya, Courbet and Bacon. Sendor extends these socio-psychological dialogues and continues to test the experiential limits of representational painting.
Supplementing the paintings, and adding to the philosphical discussion, is a new series of drawings. Executed on antique paper with such visible signs of age as oxidation, water stains and in some instances mildew, Sendor disrupts any clear determination of authorship, authenticity or chronology. Thus, the ethical discussion about humans-as-art comes full circle, back to the paintings, as Sendor encourages viewers to question the nature of his images, as signifiers of either an innocuous fictional event, or a separate, and possibly disturbing, reality.
Andrew Sendor’s work has been featured in museum exhibitions including “Phantasmania” at the Kemper Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO, “MAD LOVE” at the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, Denmark, and “XS-Size Matters” at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill, NY, which traveled to the Knoxville Museum of Art in Knoxville, TN. In addition to a solo show at Mogadishni Gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark in the Fall of 2007¬, his work has been presented in “Salon Nouveau” at the Engholm Engelhorn Galerie in Vienna, Austria and most recently the “All Too Human: Young American Painters” at Schuebbe Projects in Dusseldorf, Germany. Sendor has been featured in numerous publications including Art in America, New American Painters, M Magazine, Wonderland Magazine and Art Premium, which featured his work in a 10 page article and on the magazine’s cover.