Andy Meerow at Derosia

Artist: Andy Meerow

Exhibition title: Slanted Andy

Venue: Derosia, New York, US

Date: January 6 – February 10, 2023

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Derosia, New York

The paintings in this exhibition are granted human speech. Hanging in congregation, presenting scraps of found typography, each one addresses the room:

I’m green
I’m upside down
I’m Tuesday Morning

These statements come from sources that aren’t so much high or low as they are flat and common, like the signage of a department store chain, or the bottom of a cardboard box. There’s nothing really worth appropriating here, not in the sense of a legible power exchange. Instead, Meerow uses painting to recalibrate these mundanities to speak across a dual register, collapsing references to the materiality of the works themselves with the human interiority we might project upon them.

The messages are unreliable. The piece which tells us it is upside down nevertheless reads right side up. The painting that should be green is in fact a clash of two yellows. And this odd declaration about Tuesday Morning comes by way of a mixed up diptych, in which one of the piece’s two panels has seemingly been swapped out for another.

The canvases bare oily bleeds and waxy scrapes. They have seams and splits. Some are secured in steel frames common to exterior signage. One leans on a shelf, while another hangs from a column made of fiberboard previously painted and discarded by a photo studio. These three dimensional interventions call to mind the provisionality of shop displays and fixtures, the not-for-sale infrastructure buttressing so much product. In this installation, they are props for a pair of portraits, humanoid heads which face-off across the gallery.

One work reads “We gave a party for the gods, and the dogs all came,” tweaking a poem-cum-painting by the late John Giorno. Here, Meerow switches Giorno’s second iteration of “gods” for the word “dogs.” The altered text is painted a deep magenta which vibrates intensely in a field of chalky brown. There isn’t necessarily a punchline here, rather a humorous disorientation. The retinas hum. Subject is smudged.

Andy Meerow (b. 1980, Park Ridge, New Jersey) lives and works in New York City. Select exhibitions include Bel Ami, Los Angeles (2023); As It Stands, Los Angeles (2023); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Missouri (2022); Bodega (Derosia), New York (2021, 2016, 2014); KAJE, Brooklyn (2019); Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn (2017); Ramiken, New York (2017); Eva Meyer, Paris (2017); and And Now, Dallas (2016).