MICHAEL REEDY

IN FULL CRY

feature

July 7th, 2023

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Arch Enemy Arts presents IN FULL CRY, a spotlight of 5 works by acclaimed surrealist Michael Reedy. This small feature of impeccably technical mixed-media paintings takes viewers into the dark crevasses of the human mind–if only to poke fun at our shared, inane, and pathological obsession with the inescapable nature of our own mortality. 

 

Reedy explains: “My hope is to transport viewers to another plane and space infused with a sense of scientific aura, moral lesson, and morbid entertainment. This point-of-tension between hope and despair, humor and pain, and living and dying is infinitely interesting to me–and represents my mindset every time I look in the mirror and see another gray hair.”

 

Combining figurative and anatomical realism with op-art and geometric abstraction at a level unsurpassed today, Reedy’s anthropocentric work absorbs us into his Freudian autopsies of the human spirit. Hypno-spirals and black holes painted alongside human orifices and vaguely organic cavities offer transition points between our inner organism and the outside world. Spiraling skulls cracked and open atop cartoonish, pancreatic ghosts look like the remnants of our conflicted ego-environment relationships. And, all the while, as we question and laugh at ourselves and what we are seeing–betrayed by the subtle cues so acutely rendered by the artist–we find a deep, emotional reverence for life, death, and the human experience. 

 

“I hope people find it emotionally complex. Funny and terrifying. Hypnotic and disorienting. I have often stated that I wish I could make a drawing as emotionally complex and moving as Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights. The character of the tramp is mocked and belittled, laughed at and laughed with. There is cruelty alongside tenderness, and at its heart…goodness.”

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- Candice Musher

 

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IN FULL CRY will be on view from July 7th - 30th, 2023.
Sold works will begin to ship the week of August 6th, unless other arrangements have been made.

Items marked with a red dot have already been sold.

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