Exhibitions —

For NADA New York 2023, april april presents a solo project by New York-based artist Al Svoboda. Comprising a suite of twenty, small-scale oil on linen paintings, the presentation’s logic extends from Scaffolding I, at once a sculpture by Svoboda and an archival mechanism by which the paintings are stored. Throughout the duration of the fair, the paintings will be plucked from and placed back on Scaffolding I, revealing new compositions for the shelf-as-sculpture, and new connections for the works in juxtaposition.

Each painting’s title qualifies directionality: “to _______ where it is pointing,” and emphasizes this body of work as a navigation: the plane is imagistic, image aspiration motivates arriving there, and painting is a method for searching. Destinations shift, disappear, are inaccessible, delimiting the struggle as the unattainable point sought. Each composition visiblizes the edge around the blank on a psychic map. A handwritten index of the titles will be offered as a letterpress takeaway in an edition of 50.

Svoboda admits the images in his paintings sporadically come cropped from a memory of an object in the world. For us, this slippage into figuration brings his painting closer to photography. The work easily takes on the profile of some point-and-shoot output, especially so as the works are print-scaled.

More often they emerge from a material struggle: the paint applied tries to make room for itself, and the forms rumble around in a chance meeting, as a camera might collect optic motes firing off by accident in a pocket. Svoboda’s continued production delights in happenstance and collection en route.

Al Svoboda (b. 1991, Syracuse, New York) lives and works in New York, NY. He received his BFA from Syracuse University and is currently an MFA candidate at School of Visual Arts in New York. Recent selected group shows include Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown, NY; Wieoftnoch, Karlsruhe, Germany; Tappeto Volante, Brooklyn, NY and 57W57 Arts, New York, NY. Upcoming exhibitions include Ki Smith Gallery, New York, NY and Weatherproof, Chicago, IL.