Vanessa Prager "Voyeur"

Exhibition catalogue The Hole February 2016 Softcover, 60 pages MORE ON THE EXHIBITION: The Hole is proud to present the first New York solo show by painter Vanessa Prager. In “Voyeur”, Prager installs sixteen new paintings, some viewable only through a tiny peephole. Prager paints dense and furry oil paintings that relish in the peaks and valleys of extruded oil paint. With multiple colors of paint on the brush she blends pigment not just in the X or Y dimensions but gravity-defyingly outward into the Z. Her subject is the face, and her technique creates an image that hovers between figuration and abstraction in a sort of non-image. “Blooming Through the Brush” obscures features in a thicket of paint, while “High Five” resembles more a Franz Auerbach of frosting, crisscrossed with angry strokes. “Faded” is a sculpture of gestures, unblended strokes piled one on top of the other past the point of forgetting the facial armature that held them. Paintings like “Faded” really don’t have a