Sean Foley
Sean Foley delights in smashing together abstract styles and imagery culled from a wide range of sources in the history of the fine arts, popular culture, and science and technology. These include, but are not at all limited to, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Surrealism, comics, animation, advertising, computer graphics, geometry, cartography, and various visual representations of data. When Postmodern painters in the late twentieth century attempted such collisions, they did so in order to deconstruct abstraction, to better understand its underlying principles and ideologies through ironic juxtapositions. Foley, however, seeks not to deconstruct, but to construct, to build alternative universes of the imagination that happily admit of morphing, hybridization, humor, and spectacle. Like a mad scientist/artist, he scrambles the genetic code of painting to create wondrous new creatures that inject chaos into order and celebrate our twenty-first century culture of visual overload and data bombardment. And, like many contemporary painters, he finds that a traditional rectangular two-dimensional format can no longer contain his blasts of imagination and energy.
Sean Foley resides in Worthington, OH
Image: Sean Foley, Menace, 2007, mixed media, 12’ x 26’ x 12’, Lent by the Artist
