Peter McRury
Peter McRury (b. 1992) is a Canadian artist living and working in New York. He paints humanoid creatures in nondescript spaces. Drawing on his experience as a digital designer, the nihilistic faces he paints evolve over time in a process of constant reiteration. Interested in exploring the crossover between app-design software and figurative art, McRury manipulates his reference material by editing photographs of paintings in progress in a repetitive digital process of layering, distorting, collaging, and then referring to the resulting image when applying the next layer of paint to the canvas. Because of this iterative process, many of his paintings are lost completely under new layers. They typically involve elements of the same faces, expressions, and colors transposed to different visual contexts. His figures don’t make sense. Some have floating faces, some wear masks, some are just groups of features together in a unified form. The goal is not to paint scenes or narratives, but just to explore new ways of representing the figure and the face.
