Albany

Safe-T-Gallery is pleased to present Albany, an exhibition of paintings by Alex Stein at its new DUMBO location 111 Front St. The show will run from September 16 through October 16, and will be the featured exhibition during the annual DUMBO Arts Festival, Oct. 14 to 16.
This will be the third one-person exhibition at Safe-T-Gallery for the artist, and in many ways it will be his most ambitious. The seven paintings and installed prints in the show encompass a range of visual styles, but each work articulates the artist’s characteristic density of meaning, intense personal mythography and acute sense of pictorial rigor. Some of the paintings such as “Frances Strain, 1933” and “Charles Meryon: The Sun Spliced” use earlier artists as inspiration, not so much in their visual vocabulary as in the idea of the artist’s themselves. Other works, such as “Tetnang,” “Albany” and use personal recollections and memories as a points of origin.
Many of Alex Stein’s visual ideas start as memories, which he then ‘processes’ into the scenes and movements of his paintings -- much as a computer program might take the vague smudges of a satellite image and transform them into a missile or a truck. The large installation “Human Ranking” is an example of this, with the seed drawings originating as work the artist drew as a child. His ‘processing’ however, results in imagery that is highly nuanced, deeply nostalgic and profoundly human.