Jeff Bailey Gallery is pleased to present Jered Sprecher, I Always Lie, an exhibition of new paintings.
Sprecher’s paintings combine disparate and conflicting visual imagery from a variety of sources: quilts, children’s drawings, signage, gemstones (to name but a few). A wide range of patterns, color and texture come together into elemental, fluid shapes.
It is the shifting nature of Sprecher’s paintings that inspired the exhibition’s title, “I Always Lie”. Known as the Liar’s Paradox, here it provides for the myriad turns that happen within the poetics of painting, where reasoning, conclusions and logic can seem senseless, unacceptable, or contradictory.
Sprecher works on several paintings at the same time and the ‘conversation’ that emerges between them is a casual, yet unexpected one. Some begin with an image in mind while others develop through a process that Sprecher refers to as “feeling around in the dark”. Ultimately, the paintings relate to the designed, constructed and marked world around us.
Sprecher’s paintings could be referred to as abstractions. They are full of inconsistencies, impurities, noise, and abnormalities. These are the cracks and fissures amongst the shadows onto which the viewer can grab hold.
This is Sprecher’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. Other solo exhibitions include Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston; Kinkead Contemporary, Los Angeles; and Gallery 16, San Francisco. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Drawing Center, the Weatherspoon Museum of Art and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and is in the collections of the Nerman Museum, the Progressive Art Collection and the Knoxville Museum of Art. In 2009 he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. In summer 2013 Sprecher will be an artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas. He received his MFA from the University of Iowa in 2002. He joined the faculty of The University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2005, where he is currently an Associate Professor.
In conjunction with Sprecher’s solo exhibition, he has organized a group exhibition in the gallery’s Project Space. Titled /lēn/, it takes advantage of the Space’s unique architecture of various ledges and columns by propping paintings and sculptures throughout. The works are chosen for their resonance with the term “lean”. The artists included are: Alisha Kerlin, Carrie Pollack, John O’Connor, Martin McMurray, Mike Andrews and Jered Sprecher.