Barnaby Furnas at Marianne Boesky Gallery

In his latest show at Marianne Boesky Gallery, Barnaby Furnas morphs Grant Woods’ iconic American Gothic (now on view at the Whitney) into an eerie portrait of pitchfork-clutching quadruplet sisters defined by their flatness and conformity.  Other paintings feature charging bison and Mt Rushmore, summoning iconic ‘American’ imagery to question what that means now.  Even Furnas’ new experiments in painting technique – he has worked with the research group ARTMATR to digitally replicate his labor-intensive paint application techniques – align with the sense that these robotic characters lack a human element.  (On view in Chelsea through April 14th).

Barnaby Furnas, The Quartet, dispersed pigments, acrylic, colored pencil, pencil on linen, 51 x 38 ½ inches, 2018.