Cherry and Martin presents a two-person exhibition of large-scale oil paintings by Daniel Dove and Tom McGrath depicting modern American existence. This is the first time that the works of the Southern California-based Dove and the New York-based McGrath have been paired together.

Few American painters working today present a viable, homegrown alternative to the Leipzig school. In their respective practices, Daniel Dove and Tom McGrath provide one such option. Like the Leipzig painters, both Dove and McGrath share an interest in the syntactic heterogeneity of Gerhard Richter’s abstractions, yet Dove and McGrath also look towards other artists—in particular those of the 19th Century such as the Hudson River School (McGrath) and Turner, Constable and Courbet (Dove). Dove and McGrath invoke an often-repressed arena of painterly practice in which surface incident fuels high illusionism. Prying apart painterly syntax and its representations, in their own way Dove and McGrath each allow for the smears, scrapes and splatters of chance-driven process to be largely autonomous and independent from illusionistic content. Like the Leipzig artists, Dove and McGrath are interested in painting modernity. Both artists depict modern American existence through its banality, using vantage point, the conventions of traditional landscape painting and the dematerialized effects of photography and digital images to present new ways of viewing contemporary life.

Daniel Dove received his MFA from Yale University. His work is currently featured in the exhibition, More Is More: Maximalist Tendencies in Recent American Painting, at Florida State University in Tallahassee, FL. Recent exhibitions include I Love the Burbs at the Katonah Museum of Art (Katonah, NY); Dreaming of a More Better Future, curated by Saul Ostrow, at the Cleveland Art Institute (Cleveland, OH); and In Door Out, at ACME. gallery (Los Angeles, CA).

Tom McGrath received his MFA from Columbia University. His work has been seen in solo exhibitions at Zach Feuer Gallery (New York, NY) and Maruani-Noirhomme (Knokke-Zout, Belgium). Group exhibitions include the Triumph of Painting: Which Reality at the Saatchi Gallery (London, UK) and After Picasso/Matisse at PS1/MOMA (New York, NY).


Cherry and Martin gallery hours: Wednesday – Saturday 11am-6pm or by appointment.
For further information and images contact Mary Leigh Cherry or Philip Martin at 310.398.7404.