Conor Thompson’s work explores the mutability of compositional and tonal space in a distinctly imagined painterly world. Materiality, abstraction and figuration are given equal billing in these visual echo chambers, where landscape tropes, contour lines, and the peripheral limits of the artist’s visual field are framed in distilled states of heightened color and restructured imagery.

For the exhibition, Thompson premiers The Mouse, a new painting that illustrates the artist’s narrative mode as well as his rich, wet-on-wet oil painting technique. The scene displays an environment of mysterious locality, a rodent pulling its long tail through a mouse hole set in a domestic space that is at once moonlit and heavily mouse-trapped. The zine groups together a selection of Thompson’s charcoal studies for The Mouse.

"The Mouse" is the artist’s second solo show in New York following "Head Over Heels" held at Greenpoint Terminal Gallery in 2015. Conor Thompson (b. 1983) holds a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (2005) and a MFA in painting from UC Irvine (2016), where he just presented his thesis show. He lives in Los Angeles.

Published on the Occasion of the Exhibition
The Mouse at The Middler in New York
January 28th to March 11th, 2017