Michael Cline
Michael Cline works in a range of mediums including painting, drawing, and sculpture. A cross between Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, Michael Cline’s picture world resembles what a flea market might look like on bath salts—loads of thumb-worn and dog-eared modern and vintage visuals imagined alongside free-floating eyes, faces, and limbs. Among the more normal bits incorporated as painted elements into his latest group of canvases are the following: magazine advertisements, yard sale memorabilia, cabbage-shaped houseplants, The Berenstain Bears, and the kind of morbid symbolism that historically characterize Dutch still-lifes. Cline marshals all of these motifs into homespun visual parables. Additionally, the artist enlists his own set of wide ranging cultural influences—they veer wildly from Vermeer to Robert Henri, from Leaves of Grass to The Village Voice’s back page classifieds—to arrive at what amounts to a 21st century version of painterly Ashcan entropy.
Cline’s compositions both update tradition and distress current artistic convention. The result is a set of pictures that attach themselves firmly on both the retina and the limbic system. Few paintings today feel as vibrant or as disturbingly true to life as this artist’s cornucopia-like accretions of shopworn and …
Michael Cline works in a range of mediums including painting, drawing, and sculpture. A cross between Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, Michael Cline’s picture world resembles what a flea market might look like on bath salts—loads of thumb-worn and dog-eared modern and vintage visuals imagined alongside free-floating eyes, faces, and limbs. Among the more normal bits incorporated as painted elements into his latest group of canvases are the following: magazine advertisements, yard sale memorabilia, cabbage-shaped houseplants, The Berenstain Bears, and the kind of morbid symbolism that historically characterize Dutch still-lifes. Cline marshals all of these motifs into homespun visual parables. Additionally, the artist enlists his own set of wide ranging cultural influences—they veer wildly from Vermeer to Robert Henri, from Leaves of Grass to The Village Voice’s back page classifieds—to arrive at what amounts to a 21st century version of painterly Ashcan entropy.
Cline’s compositions both update tradition and distress current artistic convention. The result is a set of pictures that attach themselves firmly on both the retina and the limbic system. Few paintings today feel as vibrant or as disturbingly true to life as this artist’s cornucopia-like accretions of shopworn and mismatched Americana gone to seed. He has shown in a number of notable group and solo exhibitions throughout his career, including Saatchi Gallery, London, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Roma, Rome, Deste Foundation, Athens, and Horton Gallery, New York, NY, among others.
Courtesy of Zieher Smith & Horton