On the Phone with Toast
August 8 – 31, 2025
Biff Bolen
Curated by Will Douglas
Opening reception August 8, 6-8pm
Press Release
Biff Bolen’s paintings are about paint. The dripping, gooey, viscous possibility of paint. The questions that are opened up by the inability to fully speak about the seemingly boundless enterprise that the limitations of abstract painting provide. There is a certain tension Bolen develops between a kind of dead serious concrete building of deliberate structure and monstrous destabilization. Oozing surfaces push against the apparition of a recognizable image that appears out of the mist. Bolen’s paintings are tricksters; tracing Bolen’s brushwork reveals a combination of vibrating slippery speed, sludgy sticky skins, and frosting-like paint liberally skipping across the surfaces. Irreverent mark making is punctuated with meticulous geometries revealed beneath lattices that include abrupt fits and starts that characterize a certain developed play between excess and restraint. Bolen has said about his work:
“One should only be making as much sense in a painting as one can undo in the same place. I believe that the only painting worth making is the kind that avoids rationalization. A painting should be like a person. It should be comic, or violent, or whatever, but never predictable or logical. My paintings are meant to discomfort first, and then to be assimilated, like a bad stand-up comic or extremely spicy food. Start with agitation, then make a sandwich.”
Biff Bolen (born 1977, Sumter, S.C.) received a BFA in painting from Newberry College in 2000 and an MFA in Studio Art in 2012 from the University of South Florida. He has had solo and group exhibitions across the US, including the Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa; Wrong, Marfa; and Regina Rex, NYC. Bolen was an artist-in-residence at Oxbow School of Art (2011) and Acre Residency (2012). He was included in New American Paintings MFA Edition 2011 and New American Paintings West Edition 2014. Bolen currently lives and works in Santa Fe, NM.
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