rd fa presents two new exhibitions – Michael Coughlan’s “Addicted to the Anxiety of Not Knowing,” and “Two Flags” by George Stoll. Both shows opened on January 29, 2022 and will run through March 5, 2022. 

Michael Coughlan, The Conversation, 2021, Oil on canvas. 30 x 24”

Michael Coughlan’s paintings and drawings present a series of existential vignettes exploring paint, imagery, and meaning in an attempt to create what he terms emergent symbols. “The anxiety of not knowing” is that place were meaning is in a state of unfixed becoming and “the anxiety” is accompanied by the giddy pleasure of stepping off into the unknown.

In his work, objects, body parts, text, and sculptural artifacts, are isolated in desert like landscapes where they become characters in a drama and their meaning opens up. To increase this effect Coughlan uses a vertical format and the portrait association of the vertical to enhance the personification of these objects. The viewer is invited into this parched desert landscape where symbols and allegories roam free. The work specters are death and desolation, but a sly humorous voice penetrates the work. Coughlan’s self reflective work has a distinctive voice which the artist has been engaged with for a thirty year period. Coughlan’s obsession with the dry desert landscape which he presents as a stage where objects speak to each other with a voice of full of irony and self deprecation. The sculptures in the exhibition are charged relics from the desert and sometimes appear in the works. In his work, Michael Coughlan mines his unconscious in search of non-Sequitur images resonant of a contemporary human condition.

Visit the website for more info on artist George Stoll.

On view: January 29, 2022 – March 5, 2022: Gallery hours are Wed – Sat: 12- 6pm

What: Michael Coughlan, George Stoll
Where: r d f a, 3209 W. Washington Blvd., Los Angles, CA 90018
Website: https://www.rorydevinefineart.com/