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Blair Thurman, a painter at heart, explores the history of painting and its place in our media-saturated contemporary culture in his sculptures and installations. Using the traditional materials of painting, wooden stretchers, canvas, and paint, often in combination with neon tubing, he crafts representational and abstract forms that reference the histories of abstraction, Minimalism, and Pop Art, and the excesses of commercial consumer culture.

Blair Thurman was born in 1961 in New Orleans, Louisiana and studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada, as well as at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His influences range from Pop art and Minimalism to relics from childhood, popular music, and 1970s cinema.

Thurman’s use of standardized forms, derived from slot-car racetracks, architectural frameworks and found forms of everyday life, permeate his work as design elements, appearing almost abstract. The artist refers to the style and significance of his work as its “signature-content”. Within his works, he investigates the intersection between our cultural environment and our imagined fantasies.

Thurman’s work has been exhibited in several solo and group exhibitions. His solo museum exhibitions include Le Magasin—Centre National d’Art Contemporain, France (2014); “Honeybadgers,” Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma (2015); Gagosian Gallery, New York; and MAGASIN Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble. Thurman’s work is featured in several permanent collections, including the Centre national des arts plastique, Paris; Le Consortium, Dijon; Fonds régional d’art contemporain, France; and the Syz Collection, Switzerland. Thurman’s work was included in the 46th Biennale di Venezia in 1995.

Thurman currently lives and works in New York.

Gallery Artists

Gallery Artists

Blair Thurman