Rosson Crow

Queens Butcher Shop, 1910 2008 Oil, enamel and acrylic on canvas 96 x 144 in.

'Texas Crude' 16 Jan—21 Feb 2009

White Cube Hoxton Square is pleased to present ‘Texas Crude’, featuring the work of Rosson Crow in her first exhibition at the gallery. The Texan-born Californian-based artist has produced a series of large-scale paintings which portray grand scenes, inspired by moments in history.

The spaces depicted in Crow’s work are of mythical or mythologized locations, devoid of people but with implications of recent habitation, as if capturing the moment after a party has ended. Her paintings are inspired by diverse references – Baroque and Rococo interior design, cowboy culture, Las Vegas architecture, theatre and music – their dominant scale pulling the viewer into the psychological space of the spectacle. A rich palette and exuberant application of paint distinguish her paintings, which are developed through extensive research and sketched studies, before finally being rendered with assured speed on the canvas.

A sense of time collapsing and history repeating emerges throughout the exhibition. In Poverty Partye at the White House, a grand vaulted ballroom bears witness to a scene of debauched revelry, with the remains of a carnivorous feast strewn across a table. The tableau of frenzied feeding, at odds with the room’s refined formal setting, implies a moment of wild abandonment before the opulent party is inevitably drawn to a close. New York Stock Exchange After Bond Rally, 1919 features a lavishly decorated room, in louche disarray, after a rally to promote Liberty Bonds, the type of war bond sold in the US to support the Allied cause in the First World War. The dynamic perspective of both paintings and their radiant artificial illumination draw the viewer deep inside the illusory space, only to be disrupted by oozing drips and splashes thrown across the surface plane. Such convergence of painterly styles characterise Crow’s work, as does the ongoing exploration of artifice. Stage sets, platforms, drapes and ornamental displays indicate a transitory use of location and the construct behind the façade. Animal skins slung up by temporary ropes provide the setting in Dawson City Furrier Caters to Klondike Fever, while the Soutine-like, flayed carcases of Queens Butcher Shop, 1910, function as semi-improvised demarcations of space as well as making the potent allusion to the charnel house.

The pioneering spirit of turn of the century America is referenced in works such as Wildcattin’ in Paradise, which points to an era when the physical and economic landscape of Crow’s home state of Texas was transformed by the discovery of oil. ‘Wildcatters’ were speculators who drilled in areas not previously known to yield oil, the term originating from the clearance of wildlife in the prospective fields, including feral cats whose pelts would then be hung from the oil derricks. The dark, earthy palette of the painting intensifies the density of the field, overpopulated by steel machinery, contaminating the rural idyll.