Eric N. Mack (b. 1987, Columbia, MD) lives and works in New York. He received his BFA from The Cooper Union, NY and his MFA from Yale University, CT. In 2017, Mack was the recipient of the inaugural BALTIC Artists’ Award selected by artist Lorna Simpson and completed the Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva Island, FL and an artist-in-residency at Delfina Foundation in London, UK. Institutional solo exhibitions include Lemme walk across the room, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2019); In austerity, stripped from its support and worn as a sarong, The Power Station, Dallas, TX (2019); the BALTIC Artists’ Award 2017, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2017); and Eric Mack: Vogue Fabrics, Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2017). Major group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial 2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Ungestalt, Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2017); In the Abstract, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, MA (2017); Blue Black, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO (2017); Making & Unmaking: An exhibition curated by Duro Olowu, Camden Arts Centre, London, UK (2016); and Greater New York 2015, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY (2015). Mack’s work is in the permanent collections of Albright-Knox Art Gallery, The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Virginia Overton was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1971 and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Solo exhibitions include Landcraft Garden Foundation, Mattituck, New York (2023); Hypermaremma, Orbetello, Italy (2023); Frist Art Museum, Nashville (2022); Goldsmiths CCA, London (2022); White Cube Hong Kong (2020); Socrates Sculpture Park, New York (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, Arizona (2017); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2014); Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, Germany (2013); Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2013); The Power Station, Dallas, Texas (2013); and The Power House, Memphis, Tennessee (2007). Group exhibitions include 59th Venice Biennale (2022); The Ranch, Montauk, New York (2021); Hayward Gallery, London (2020); Front Triennial, Cleveland (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, Michigan (2017); and Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2016).

The four paintings on view develop from two works that were shown in the artist’s recent Frieze London booth: a six-foot-high praying mantis and a Fabergé figure of obsidian. The artist returns to this miniature world with whimsical-severe representations of model train figures. An alienated headshot crosses paths with three simulated city dwellers. The scale shift allows an expression, a view of detached honesty, and ideas of absence and presence to be naturally prominent. Their model quality conveys the whole of reality as an object to behold. This can free the viewer, and it folds back toward the city outside, a step in a negation-based quest for awareness and the desire to be There.

The open-ended title of the show, according to the artist, relates to reification, reincarnation, or other possibilities, or the imaginary life of the letter R caught in a momentary phrase. Lead Model 1 is semi-faceless, Lead Model 2 is stripped down to the truth, Mantis Head bears antennae to receive tenuous connections, and Lead Model 3 is assertive, pupils displaced, before a cascading checkered pattern. The round bit of land for each of the models permits the subordination of genre: the paintings consolidate still life, portrait, and landscape into one collapsed totality.

The particular features of each figure speak to different abstract forces. Transposed humanity, substitute bodies, a confrontation with autopilot tendency… perhaps an indirect fusillade against objectification of being, with the historical purpose of registering that the figure has been progressively dehumanized by the limbo of representation. And yet, knowingly simplified figures have been a carrier of feeling since the beginning of art. The arrangement at The Frame taps into the artist’s core themes: appearance, incompleteness, iconoclasm, detachment, and substantiality — as witness the artist’s brief overview of practice that accompanies this group.