Ceysson & Bénétière

James Hyde, born 1958 in Philadelphia, USA, lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, USA.
 
From the first glance, James Hyde's paintings look like art. This may even be a radical position for an artist today to take--ever since Marcel Duchamp signed a urinal and exhibited it as an artwork, avant-garde practice has involved crossing over into the realm of non-art, intentionally shrugging off high art's conventions. Some of Hyde's materials nod to this position (he often uses Styrofoam, silk, industrial carpet and vinyl tape) and sometimes a work is not attached vertically to a wall. But the work comes together according to an aesthetic logic, a part-whole relationship that exists in things that are made with intentionality. As art, and unlike nature, Hyde's works direct your attention. He makes them to refer to the history of painting.Hyde, on the other hand, has employed an approach within painting that achieves the transcendent potential of fiction without risking the narrowing effects of narration. In his work he has broken with modernist abstraction's illusionistic picture--even if there is space in one of his paintings one is always prevented entry into it by one's awareness of the physical object. The surface of a fresco painting, layered strokes of paint over a background wash, is linked to its projecting Styrofoam base. You want to see the surface as an illusion, but cannot deny its limitations because of the clear presence of its underpinnings. Hyde also encourages references to useful objects and everyday situations--handles, shelves and guard rails can be seen in past works. Minimalists favored industrial materials like steel, aluminum and plastics and used them hermetically, which prevented them from touching everyday experience. Hyde makes art that seems thoroughly vernacular; the materials furnish accesses for the viewer, meeting her halfway, and perhaps invoking in her the desire to believe in the work, or to be transported by it.
Excerpted from James Hyde: Lean Narrative - Alison Green.
 
Recent solo exhibitions include Observatory and other recent painting, David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen, DK (2015); Landscape, Luis de Jesus, Los Angeles, CA, US (2015); Varieties of Useful Experience, Volume Gallery, Chicago, IL, US (2015); 20 Year Survey of James Hyde's Paintings, C.Ar.D., Magazzini, Pianello Val Tidone, IT (2014); Reservoir, Freedman Gallery, Albright College, Reading, PA, US (2013); 
 
Recent group exhibitions include SITElines 2014: Unsettled Landscapes, SITE Santa Fe, NM, US (2014); We Should Talk to Each Other, the Cloud and I, Mary S. Byrd Gallery, Georgia Regents University, Augusta, GA, US (2014), Building Materials, Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT, US (2013); James Hyde and Wallace Whitney, Horton Gallery, NADA Miami, Miami, FL, US (2013);
 
James Hyde's works are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina Greensboro, NC; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, NY; Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; Museo Cantonale d'Arte, Lugano, Switzerland; and Musee Fabre, Montpellier, France, among others.
 
He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship in 2000 and the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008. Hyde is presently Faculty Critic at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and at The Cooper Union for Advancement of Science and Art.

Hyde often employs unconventional materials when painting that range from plaster, nylon, chrome, steel to styrofoam and glass. His practice has been described as an "exploration of physicality" in his experimentations with different textures and planes that often re-evaluate and expand the limits and boundaries of painting.

Hyde describes his work in saying:

I think painting is never entirely about being a painted object, nor a medium in the narrow sense. I think painting is, as well, a symbolic and allegorical situation that happens to be made by a particular medium and set of materials. And really as a painter I've tried to put pressure on what a painting is and rethink it in different ways. And that's how I end up with such different ways of looking at various possibilities, especially in terms of abstract painting."

In 2003 he started to incorporate photography into his work while maintaining his use of alternative materials acquired from his work as a general contractor in the late 1970s.

When asked about his technique as an artist, Hyde says:

Minimalism is where I really came from, what I looked at, and what I thought about; but I was less interested in the grid as a type of compositional device than as serialization and repetition. The grid was just a means for placing those fresco panels and repeating them in a way that doesn't involve notions of space, which I've never been interested in. Repetition allowed a sequential logic-a music of visual information.

Hyde's work often involves a number of alternative materials that he has incorporated into his minimalist paintings, sometimes creating three-dimensional pieces that explore new planes and arrangements.

Hyde arrived as a teenager in New York City in 1977. Although he had already begun his artistic practice he had, for a time early in his career, rejected showing his work within the art world out of a "frustration of what was being shown", instead devoting much of his time to his work as a general contractor. Hyde began to integrate himself more within the art world in the early 1980s.

Hyde is a recipient of the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2008, the Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2011, the Joan-Mitchell Foundation Fellowship in 2000[13] and the New York State CAPS Grant in 1982.

Group shows at Ceysson Gallery
Feed the Meter, Wandhaff
September 23 - December 16, 2017


Selected Solo Shows

2016
Pyramid Lake, Reynolds Gallery, Richmond, Virginia, USA

2015
Observatory and other recent painting, David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark
Landscape, Luis de Jesus, Los Angeles, USA
Varieties of Useful Experience, Volume Gallery, Chicago Illinois, USA

2014
20 Year Survey of James Hyde's Paintings, Curated by Paolo Baldacci, C.Ar.D., Magazzini, Pianello Val Tidone, Italy
James Hyde, Galerie Filles du Calvaire, Paris, France

2013
Six Works Around a Dam, David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark

2011
INHERE, Shau Ort, Zurich, Switzerland

2010
MIX, Kathleen Cullen, New York, USA
Live Principles of Ventilation and Adhesion, Villa du Parc Contemporary, Annemasse, France

2009
Unbuilt, Southfirst, Brooklyn, New York, USA
Reformation, Satellite FDC, Brussels, Belgium

2008
Survey, Maison de la Culture de Bourges, Bourges, France

2007
Glass Box Paintings: 1995-2007, Reynolds Gallery, Richmond, USA
Painting Then for Now, in collaboration with Svetlana Alpers and Barney Kulok, David Krut Projects, New York, USA

2006
Contemporary Links 4: James Hyde, San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, USA

2005
Elisabeth Kaufman Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland

2004
Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, USA

2002
Centre d'Art Contemporain d'Ivry, Galerie Fernand Leger/Credac, Ivry-sur-Seine, France

2000
Installation of small works, curated by Jonathan Van Dyke, Susquehanna Art Museum, Harrisburg, USA

1999
Le Quartier, Centre d Art Contemporain de Quimper, France

1997
James Hyde Paintings, 1992-1997, Queens Museum, Queens, New York, USA

Selected Group Shows

2017
Avant-Grave, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn, New York, USA
Vatic Utterance, Trestre, Brooklyn, New York, USA
Surface Feelings, Coustof Waxman, New York, USA

2016
Portrait of a Landscape, curated by Claudia Cortínez, Shirley Fiterman Art Center, New York, USA

2014
SITElines 2014: Unsettled Landscapes, SITE Santa Fe, USA
Far In Out, curated by Jerome Lefevre, Galerie Triangle Bleu, Stavelot, Belgium

2013
PAINT THINGS: Beyond the Stretcher, deCordova Museum, Lincoln, USA

2012
Three Points Determine a Circle, James Hyde, Fabienne Lasserie, and Lucas Blalock, Kleinert/James Arts Center, Woodstock, USA
Tops, Open Space, Long Island City, New York, USA

2010
The Jewel Thief, Tang Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, USA
The Image in Contemporary Painting, Visual Arts Gallery, the School of Visual Arts, New York, USA

2007
Citadel 1 Front Room / Killing Room, David Risley Gallery, London, United Kingdom
The Photograph as Canvas, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, USA

2006
James Hyde, Richard Woods and Stephen Dean, David Risley Gallery, London, United Kingdom
Transformer, Main Line Art Center, Haverford, USA
Take A Seat, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York, USA

2004
Floor Play, Brooklyn War Memorial Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, USA
Working in Brooklyn, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York, USA
Motorcycle and Art, Susquehanna Art Museum, Harrisburg, USA

2003
BQE II, Curated by Christian Viveros-Faune & Joel Beck, White Box, New York, USA
Skowhegan Faculty Exhibition, Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, Portland, USA

2001
Selections from the Permanent Collection, curated by Bonnie Clearwater, Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, USA
BROOKLYN!, Museum of Contemporary Art, Palm Beach, USA

2000
Pintura, FRAC d'Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France
Offshore, Kunstforeningen, Bergen, Norway

1999
Untitled, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York
Material Issues: Recent Gifts from the Collection of Katherine and James Gentry, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, USA

1998
Hey, You Never Know, Kenny Schacter, New York, USA
The Corcoran Collects: Selections from the Permanent Collection, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C, USA

1997
Current Undercurrent, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, USA

1996
Transformal, curated by Maia Damianovic, Vienna Secession, Vienna, Austria

1995
New York Abstract, Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, USA

"After his influential investigations of paintings as objects of some bulk, Mr. Hyde returns to flatness. Now structure is provided by digital photographs - all taken by the artist and often printed quite large - of half-built structures, construction sites, clouds, trees, close-ups of the human hand and a single flower. Appended with strips of tape, painted shapes and bits of painted wood on Styrofoam, these works function like drawings. They show how Mr. Hyde thinks and what he looks at, something of his working process, and above all his desire to avoid ruts." - Roberta Smith, "James Hyde: Unbuilt," The New York Times, April 24, 2009.

"Artists that have twenty or thirty years of art practice behind them almost invariably reveal and intensify their primary interests. In the case of James Hyde this would seem to be both true and not true when one studies his output. There is progress but the progression seems to form an ellipse: the same calm confidence has existed in the work all along as he easily and often combines various artworks from past exhibitions with more recent ones. This takes place in Hyde's current exhibition, where he has included at least one sculptural type "Pandora", (enamel on cast aluminum hybrid) from 2003 that typically traverses the pictorial and the sculptural. What is newly revealed is that Hyde is a more far-ranging investigator than many might have thought." - Joe Fyfe, "James Hyde at the Villa du Parc," 2010.

"Painted in the language of abstraction, but never conforming to stylistic conventions, Hyde's colored papier-mache rectangles and broad swaths of paint alternately cover, dissolve into and call attention to sections of the photograph beneath. This exhibition of painting on photographs brings the object sharply into focus-Hyde knows well that putting paint on the surface of a photograph not only erases the veracity of the image, but magnifies the interplay between image and surface, and by obstructing our view of the photograph and complicating our view of the painting, he allows us to see both more clearly, with the style, energy and inventiveness that we have come to expect from him. The photographs, which support these paintings, depict both the natural world and the urban built environment; several pictures show buildings in various stages of completion, all without a skin, giving us a view into the structure…Hyde, who in a former life earned his income as a contractor, clearly understands the language of construction. The mechanics of building after all is not so different from the mechanics of seeing, and in this exhibition Hyde-as-architect has given us a new city, one built from, and on top of, photographs; a city that honors the brick and allows us to see not only the method of construction but the substance of it." - Irving Evans, "The Hydes of March," Dossier Journal, March 17, 2009.

"As a painter", Hyde says, "I'm concerned with the processes of how painting is constructed and recognized. I try to keep this narrative legible - making the actions of coating, covering, marking, or folding distinct as gestures so that they are both an action and a description of an action." For this reason, Hyde focuses on the greatest possible tension between the heterogeneity of the single image components and the unity of the pictorial-painterly effect. Hyde maximizes the tension between heterogeneity and homogeneity. This means that he is not interested with only the one or the other, but in the transfer between the two; in the possibility that as things drift apart they might transform into something belonging together only to fall apart into singular elements a moment later..." - Michael Lüthy, translated from German, "James Hyde," Schau Ort exhibition publication, March 2011.