Get Real: New American Painting

A selection of artists from across the country--Haley Hasler, Jason John, Andrea Kowch, Bryan LeBoeuf, Jenny Morgan, Kevin Muente, Frank Oriti, and Kevin Peterson--provides a snapshot of contemporary realist painting in the United States. _Get Real_'s heavily figurative focus explores themes that have persisted throughout the recent history of American realist painting such as narrative portraiture and social, psychological, and magical realism.The eight artists present a multifaceted view of the American experience, contrasting the historic and the contemporary, pastoral and urban landscapes, the personal and the universal, the immanent and the transcendent. Through the eyes of these painters, the viewer may travel between the magical depictions of a distant American heartland in work of Kowch or Muente to the hardscrabble, urban worlds of Oriti or Peterson. Whether their inspiration is drawn from memory or reality, the artists strike a balance between the everyday and the epic as seen in LeBoeuf's tightly controlled theatrical compositions or John's surreal scenes that seem to be in a state of perpetual motion. Aspects of identity and relationships, as well as issues of sexuality and femininity, are best explored through the works of Hasler and Morgan.The products of diverse educational and geographic roots, these young painters, mostly under the age of forty, are charting a path for American realist painting. Although rooted in a strong tradition of art history, they are also very much products of the modern world and the global information age.