Clayton Schiff

Harkawik is pleased to announce our solo presentation with New York painter Clayton Schiff at NADA Miami 2024. In six new paintings, essential truths about life's absurdities, moments of quiet resignation, triumph and clarity, and strange disquieting coincidences, are distilled into simple gestural actions. These actions span the mundane to the semi-mythical: tearing into a meal with shame and gusto, painting in marinara on a napkin; gnawing on a rock in defiance; sipping sweetly from a drinking fountain; embracing a lover in passionate disincorporation; staring vacantly into the abyss. Patterned surfaces suggest perceptual shifts and consciousness-expansion, and our eyes are challenged to make sense of what we see. Schiff's creatures lack identifiable features that might give them any specific identity, amplifying and clarifying their humanity. Their bodies are often edged in a curious halo that seems to exist somewhere between gestural action, pentimenti, and incidental markmaking, and architecture and urban space almost always serve to contort or confine them. Schiff shows us the quiet dignity and disgraces of everyday life, and the transformative potential of introspection.