The Landing is pleased to announce Still Light, a solo exhibition of new acrylic on panel paintings by Henry Glavin. This exhibition marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles and will be on view from September 14th to October 26th, 2024. In Still Light, Glavin explores the architecture and landscape of the Northeast by bathing seemingly comforting and familiar spaces with a stark light that subverts nostalgia, rendering them vacant and uncanny.

Glavin’s paintings draw from locations across upstate New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, yet they all seem to emerge from a shared American landscape. Sourceless shadows, blunt highlights, repeating forms, and meticulously detail characterize his visual language. The human figure is conspicuously absent, even in works that reveal the interiors of homes through windows, conjuring a pervasive silence that echoes throughout the exhibition.

His approach exaggerates romantic tropes, like golden hour skies and dappled light, while introducing unsettling flatness, unreliable light sources, and skewed perspectives. Viewers may initially feel a sense of comfort in the content of his imagery, but a nagging sense of what is absent or askew emerges with sustained looking.The paintings are not translations of the actual space, but stitched together facades of them that are distanced by screens and memory. The result is a constructed image that has a double valence– ranging from comforting to unsettling.

The influence of contemporary photography, particularly iPhone photography, is evident in the formats and perspectives of Glavin’s work. Still Light pushes his work further into the cinematic realm, blending traditional landscape painting with modern photography to create scenes that feel both staged and spontaneous. Similarly, Glavin’s painting technique is a balance between precision and intuition. He begins by mathematically scaling photographic references onto his panels, building a grid using graphite and a T-Square, he constructs an initial blueprint-like composition. However, he quickly abandons these rigid guides in favor of memory and imagination, transforming familiar places into haunting, dreamlike visions that exist somewhere between reality and recollection.

While painting, Glavin applies matte acrylic, mixed without a medium, that results insurfaces that invite a tactile engagement distant from oil painting. He describes the effect as a sort of “itchiness”; one that adds a physical dimension to the sensory experience of his work. The nagging absences of Glavin’s compositions articulate with his itchy painterly qualities to create an overall otherworldliness that permeates his paintings of subjects otherwise near and known to us.

CV

EDUCATION

2023 MFA Hunter College, New York, NY
2014 BFA Alfred University, New York State College of Ceramics
2013 Santa Reparata International School of Art and Design, Florence, Italy

SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2024 Still Light, The Landing Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2023 A Grid and a Shadow, Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY
2021 Between Rooms, Galerie C, Paris, FR
2020 Never Paint A Ladder, Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY
2018 Wooden Calendar, Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY

GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2024 Snow Birds, KDR, Miami, FL
Changing Times, Galerie C, Paris, France
2023 Immersed, Jack Siebert Projects, Los Angeles, CA
Invisible Cities, Hunter MFA Thesis Exhibition, New York, NY
2022 De quelle épaisseur sont faits nos silences?, Galerie C, Neuchâtel, Switzerland
Un Jour Large, Galerie C, Paris, France
Greener Grass, curated by David Kennedy Cutler, Halsey Mckay, East Hampton, NY
The Views, curated by Zoe Fisher, Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles, CA
Thaw, The Landing, Los Angeles, CA
2019 In The Pines, Greene House Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
2018 In My Room: Artists Paint the Interior 1950-Now, The Fralin Museum of Art, UVA, Charlottesville, VA
2018 Glade Hits, Group Show, Halsey Mckay Gallery, East Hampton, NY
2014 Best of SUNY, Group Show, NYS Museum, Albany, NY
2014 Stills (BFA Thesis Exhibition), Group Show, Alfred University, Alfred, NY
2014 Subject to Change, Two Person Show, Robert Turner Gallery, Alfred, NY
2014 Parallel Works, Group Show, Robert Turner Gallery, Alfred, NY
2014 Spring 2014 SUNY Exhibition, Group Show, State University Plaza, SUNY Albany NY
2013 Venn Diagram, Group Show, Robert Turner Gallery, Alfred, NY
2013 Ekphrasis, Group Show, Robert Turner Gallery, Alfred, NY
2013 Group Show, Santa Reparata International School of Arts,Florence, Italy
2011 Hornell Painting, Group Show, Hornell, NY

BIBLIOGRAPHY
2021 Smith, Roberta, On Governors Island, Art Interventions Are Everywhere, The New York Times, May 6, 2021
2020 Angelos, Ayla, Henry Glavin Cites the Tension Between Architecture and Landscape, Its Nice That, July 3, 2020

HONORS AND AWARDS
2016 Vermont Studio Center Residency Fellowship
2014 Senior Award for Outstanding BFA Thesis Exhibition, Alfred University
2014 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artists Award
2014 Best of SUNY Honorable Mention Award, NYS Museum
2014 Daniel Joseph Murphy II Memorial Award for Creativity, Alfred University

Henry Glavin

Still Light Sept 14 - oct 26

Still Light

Sept 14 - oct 26