Ceysson & Bénétière

Ceysson & Bénétière is pleased to present Wrecked Angle, a two-person exhibition of works by New York based artists Rosy Keyser and Joseph Montgomery. Wrecked Angle will be on view from June 18th through July 30th, 2021 and is both of the artists’ first exhibition with Ceysson & Bénétière.

Rosy Keyser and Joseph Montgomery pack piles of duplicitous meanings into an expanded painted space, letting our viewing experience be directed to a mental state of urgency and necessity. Context, timing, the weather, jobs, family, friends, scale, construction, material, and presentation – all of these ideas jammed into their art actively contribute to a viewer coming to understand each piece of their art in the moment. To make that experience even more dynamic, Rosy and Joe literally make use of all kinds of actual stuff. Each work is a remnant of a life lived through observation and contemplation.

The support and the surface collect both action and material within studios that have no doors. The viewing experience doesn’t lead us into chaos but decides to pause at a moment of resolve. The resolution is about their labor in the studio and it is about paint, collage, composition, form, line, color and texture, etc. but it is not needing to dwell in the formal. The clarity of the steps taken is always juxtaposed by an ability to let said steps take them, and in turn us, back into the ambiguity of allowing visual experience to take us to places we don’t rationally understand. To believe in something we don’t actively understand is to be optimistic in a future we don’t know. To make art that taps into that feeling right now, in New York, feels ever prescient. Their Wrecked Angle is a wrecked beauty, exciting and hopeful. 

Rosy Keyser (b. 1974, Baltimore, MD) grew up in rural Maryland where she developed an awareness of tools and materials in the outdoors. She earned her BFA at Cornell University in 1997 and her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003. Keyser has shown extensively throughout the United States and  Europe, including solo exhibitions at Maccarone (New York and Los Angeles), Peter Blum Gallery (New York), and Contemporary Fine Arts (Berlin, Germany). Group exhibitions include: Rosy Keyser & Eleanor Mikus, Parts & Labor, Beacon, NY; Painter Painter at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, and Pink Caviar at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark. Keyser’s work is held in the permanent collections of: the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and Zabludowicz Collection, London, England. Rosy Keyser was a Fall 2017 artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation (Marfa, TX).

Joseph Montgomery (1979, Northampton, MA, USA) lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Pigpen Dispossessed at Galleri Urbane, Joe at Dürst Britt & Mayhew, Via degli Eremiti at CAR DRDE in Bologna, DOLLS (with Sherrie Levine) at Paula Cooper Gallery, Heads, Calves at Laurel Gitlen, Doll Index at Peter Blum Gallery and Five Sets Five Reps at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). His work was also shown in the seminal group exhibition Painter Painter at The Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis alongside Rosy Keyser, where they met. Work by Montgomery is held in private and public collections, including the Centraal Museum Utrecht and The Walker Art Centre. 

Jesse Willenbring, 2021