Isaac Aden: I Like America

Ethan Cohen is pleased to announce Isaac Aden: I Like America, the first solo exhibition of Aden`s work with the gallery. The exhibition features an introduction into Aden’s complex art practice by highlighting his recent body of work, I Like America. He draws its content from the American experience applying folk and regionalist vernaculars to painting. Aden reconsiders the formal possibilities of painting by applying the principles Rosalind Krauss outlines in her seminal essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field, to painting. Aden proposes what a painting in the expanded field could look like.

Key works included in the exhibition are Rodeo Painting, Nietzsche’s Horse (No Regrets for Jasper Johns) and Bead Painting. In Rodeo Painting, Aden paints a large white square on the dirt of a rodeo in Nebraska. During the rodeo horses and bulls leave marks in the paint. Nietzsche’s Horse (No Regrets for Jasper Johns) is a life size naturalistic aluminum horse sculpture.  A twelve- foot piece of neon glass connects the horse and a canvas made by using quilting techniques. Additionally, Aden covers an entire canvas with sewn seed beads, synthesizing Lakota shamanism and post-digital pointillism.

Reflecting the curatorial aspect of Aden’s practice and, concurrent with the exhibition I Like America, Aden organized First We Take Manhattan; a group exhibition based on the internationalist agenda of Leonard Cohen. By conflating the predetermined roles of “artist” and “curator” Aden questions the limits of both.