Conor Backman’s first solo museum exhibition features paintings, assemblages, and sculptures completed within the last five years. Lushly depicted fruit trees, tinted glass panels, cast-resin orange peels, and cross-sectioned paint cans all play a role in Backman’s deft investigations into the history of materiality and illusionistic space in realist painting. His most recent paintings, while rooted in the romantic natural world of the 19th-century Hudson River School, include ready-made elements that disrupt the picture plane with contemporary concerns related to perception and the idea that we live in a world made newly flat through unlimited access to information.
Conor Backman received BFAs in Painting, Printmaking, Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2011. He has had solo exhibitions at Smart Objects, Los Angeles (2016); James Fuentes, New York (2015); Retrospective Gallery, Hudson, New York (2015); and The Capodimonte Museum, Naples, Italy (2014); and has been included in group exhibitions at Galerie Gebr Lehmann, Berlin (2016); David Zwirner, New York (2015); Saamlung, Hong Kong (2012); and Higher Pictures, New York (2012).
Funding provided by UAlbany’s Office of the President and Office of the Provost, The University at Albany Foundation, and University Auxiliary Services.
