Sean Mahan, “A Shadow of the Future”
December 12th 2020 – January 10th 2020
December 12th 2020 – January 10th 2020
Haven Gallery is pleased to present Florida based artist Sean Mahan for his first solo show at the gallery entitled, “A Shadow of the Future”. “A Shadow of the Future” features ten new acrylic paintings that showcase his iconic, stylized portraits of children that echo back to the fifties and sixties in design, fashion and aesthetic. Mahan’s work pays homage to the past, specifically in advertising styles, palettes and artistic straightforwardness. His sitters tend to be children, and their compositions, colorful, clean and new, embracing that in which is untouched and genuine.
Mahan describes himself as a “social realist figurative painter”. His artwork has emerged from breaking down the conventions of traditional marketing and advertising and through this process he found himself fetishizing objects from the past. Mahan’s paintings portray clothing, appliances, patterns, and bold color palettes from notably visual periods as he finds himself drawn to items of that era. Perhaps these items provide a comfort to Mahan, but they also represent many dichotomies such as beauty and functionality. “A Shadow of the Future” goes one step further by exploring the childhood dreams that lingers at the back of all our subconscious minds.
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“A Shadow of The Future.
The sweet and delightful dreams of our childhood are deeply obscured by the looming shadows of the future. They can’t seem to exist outside our imaginations, yet we don’t let them die. We hold them in the deepest parts of our hearts, hoping to support them back to life. We are coerced by the necessity of our situation into placing the dreams of childhood deep into the background of our attention and they are sometimes lost there for a lifetime. But they lurk in the shadows, driving us to find happiness in their faint expressions — that echo into the future. We look to discover and uncover those dreams in the discarded objects of the past. We revisit old places and objects. And sometimes, unexpectedly find crystalized memories there — sparking our feelings of wonder, delight, and sweetness. This series of paintings explores the embers of our childhood dreams, that quietly glow in the shadows, with the hopes to discover that they are ready to warm us if we were just to add a little firewood.”
– Sean Mahan
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Mahan describes himself as a “social realist figurative painter”. His artwork has emerged from breaking down the conventions of traditional marketing and advertising and through this process he found himself fetishizing objects from the past. Mahan’s paintings portray clothing, appliances, patterns, and bold color palettes from notably visual periods as he finds himself drawn to items of that era. Perhaps these items provide a comfort to Mahan, but they also represent many dichotomies such as beauty and functionality. “A Shadow of the Future” goes one step further by exploring the childhood dreams that lingers at the back of all our subconscious minds.
–
“A Shadow of The Future.
The sweet and delightful dreams of our childhood are deeply obscured by the looming shadows of the future. They can’t seem to exist outside our imaginations, yet we don’t let them die. We hold them in the deepest parts of our hearts, hoping to support them back to life. We are coerced by the necessity of our situation into placing the dreams of childhood deep into the background of our attention and they are sometimes lost there for a lifetime. But they lurk in the shadows, driving us to find happiness in their faint expressions — that echo into the future. We look to discover and uncover those dreams in the discarded objects of the past. We revisit old places and objects. And sometimes, unexpectedly find crystalized memories there — sparking our feelings of wonder, delight, and sweetness. This series of paintings explores the embers of our childhood dreams, that quietly glow in the shadows, with the hopes to discover that they are ready to warm us if we were just to add a little firewood.”
– Sean Mahan
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