Franklin Evans presents fourpaintingstwowallsiowatonewyork, literally four paintings on two walls replete with references to the past, including of his graduate school time in Iowa. The Volta walls mimetically reflect the studio walls on which the paintings were made, exposing the interior thought and memory driving Evans’ practice. Evans’ recent obsessive explorations of 1913 Armory and Matisse’s Blue Nude in that exhibition, Robert Irwin’s 1960’s orange paintings about perception, and Evans’ own 2014 juddrules andjuddpaintings exhibitions in Boston, comingle with his past relationship to the University of Iowa where fellow Zevitas artists John Dilg (Painting Professor at the university) and Ann Pibal (a classmate of Evans at Iowa). Typical to Evans practice, he flips between digital and material, process and object, thought and action, and the present and memory. Evans’ totalizing environment offers layers of context that simultaneously reveal and overwhelm through the abundance of visual data. Evans’ artwork occupies the field of painting/installation with the studio process and site as its subjects. His work embodies a contemporary conceptualization of networks: constant flux, absorption of other content, defocused experience of the present, rhizomic replication, and self-referentiality. Franklin Evans was born in Reno, Nevada and lives and works in New York, NY. He has degrees from Stanford University and the University of Iowa. Evans has had nearly twenty solo exhibitions in the United States and Europe in the past decade and has been included in numerous group exhibitions at, among others: MoMA PS1, NY; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, MA; DiverseWorks, TX; RISD Museum, RI; Weatherspoon Art Museum, NC; Futura, Prague, Czech Republic; El Museo del Barrio, NY; The Drawing Center, NY; Nevada Museum of Art, NV; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, CA. Evans work is included in the public collections of Orlando Museum of Art, FL; El Museo del Barrio, NY; Weatherspoon Art Museum, NC; University of California, Riverside, CA; Pizzuti Collection, OH; The Progressive Art Collection, OH; Salomon Foundation, France.
