Thursday Night Manhattan Art Gallery Opening

Scot Borofsky - One man Show

https://scotsart.net/

Excerpts from Artblog

Scot Borofsky started as a graffiti artist in the East Village (NYC) and eventually made his way into the museum and commercial gallery art world. His work can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Brooklyn Museum of Art, a rare accomplishment for a graffiti street artist. Borofsky’s art combines the depth of tradition with the uncertainty of the contemporary, linking the ages with a sacred line. The work may appear to be simple abstractions but Borofsky is giving you the ARCHETYPE, layered. God knows what these images are doing to viewers’ brains. The layering of archetypal line sets Borofsky’s paintings apart from most abstract paintings, and it is worth study. Scot takes a conceptual approach to the historical line, giving it a contemporary purpose. This interview was conducted in person.

From Artforum

Borofsky uses primary symbols derived from nature: the sun, wind, a mountain, the human figure. Their source gives them a universality, and yet they have been radically simplified for the contemporary taste, further ensuring their easy recognizability by a heterogeneous audience—a strategy ideal for his public art. At the same time, their pictographic quality suggests both a respect for the ancient cultures from which their imagery has been adapted and a like reverence for the natural cosmos. Thus in the painting Buddhist Allegory, 1985, a large golden triangle, perhaps a mountain/omphalos/axis mundi, points to a small brilliant white sphere above in a navy blue sky that also contains two large spirals. The spiral, whether flinging outward or collapsing inward, connotes continuous change, so it’s significant that these are moving in opposite directions (one in the generative clockwise direction, the other in the destructive reverse), with the point of luminous clarity very distant. In an otherwise simple composition simplistically painted, this sign of a fundamental discordance in the world is startling; there are no other visual cues to support it.
Borofsky’s connection to elemental forces of nature is intrinsic to a mystical spirit, but his description of a world gone awry is puny and appears almost inadvertent (in fact, the artist has stated his work’s aim as a “message of spiritual harmony”). His paintings are intriguing because he has found motifs to reveal states of consciousness, albeit fundamentally confused ones; and, on another level, because he does seem to hold something sacred—namely, a holistic conception of nature. What he doesn’t treat with reverence is the act of making art, looking there by like a pop spiritualist who paints signs.