Yuri Masnyj

Yuri Masnyj
A World of Interiors

10 January - 7 February 2004

For Yuri Masnyj's first one-person show, he is including 30 new drawings, the latest in a continuous drawing project begun in 2000. The drawings are deceptively simple, thoughtfully layered and inventive fantasies of modernist art and interior design. Minimally defined architectural details serve as containers for shelves, cabinets, and other furnishings that in turn contain an inventory of paintings, sculpture, and objects that sometimes form tableau or evolve indefinitely and occasionally disintegrate into explosions of fragmented color.

Four of the drawings are of explosions of materials devoid of interior context except for the identity of the flying fragments themselves. Five drawings are extended images, 18 x 58 inches, that like Chinese scrolls, exhaustively generate variations of art and dŽcor organized within an endless jumble of wall units. Twenty 8 x 10 inch drawings are vignettes where only tentative logic belays their refined order and balance. Stylistically, the drawings reference architectural studies or design proposals. The structures in the drawings are thin graphite lines, while color is both descriptive and abstract in a range of mediums, such as white-out correcting fluid for white on the off-white paper, ball-point pen for blue, graphite for areas of black as well as colored pencils, inks and paint.

Yuri Masnyj was born in Washington D.C. in 1976 and lives in New York City where he received a BFA from Cooper Union. His work was included in International Paper at The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; in a 2003 drawing show at Metro Pictures and in galleries in New York City, London, Brooklyn and Berlin.