Sam Bornstein: Spiel Room

Charles Moffett is pleased to present Spiel Room, a solo exhibition of new paintings by New York-born-and-based artist Sam Bornstein. The exhibition marks the painter's third solo show with the gallery and his first in the gallery's recently opened second location at 437 Washington Street. Gathering together around 10 new oil paintings, the exhibition continues the artist's combination of biography, fantasy, memory, and imagination to create layered works investigating the twin creative processes of painting and storytelling.

Ranging from interiors to rooftops to city street scenes, the paintings portray moments of informal performance, filtered through the artist's singularly diaphanous and dreamlike veil. Throughout the compositions on view, one sees everything from a musical duo of mythological figures on a Manhattan rooftop to a couple flying kites inside their apartment - Bornstein's players and the art performed emerging from a hybrid of the imaginary, remembered, and folkloric.

The set for many of these figures, symbols, and objects is familiar terrain to Bornstein, one he's revisited throughout his practice - his childhood home in a Union Square loft building that also functioned as a performance venue, filled with an extended family of artists, musicians, writers, and filmmakers.  One painting, Union Square 1979 (Jacob Wrestling an Angel, Musicians, Fantasy Baseball), 2023, portrays the happenings in the home years before the artist was born. Envisioned from the lens of the present, Bornstein depicts the musicians that hung around the apartment when it doubled as a rehearsal space, the baseball players his brother idolized, plus a dreamlike circular window that opens into another realm where the biblical figure Jacob wrestles an angel, a symbolic story of triumph over struggle. Rather than demarcating space and time, these layered portals and openings allow for a collapse of those existential restrictions, creating a world where the imagined, recalled, and invented are seamlessly intertwined.

Throughout Bornstein's work, the notion of repeating portals evokes both the endless inner windows of one's mind, moments morphing into memories, memories into stories; as well as the endless structural windows of the artist's lifelong home of New York City, porous architectural boundaries that dictate and surround a life here. Beyond living his whole life in the city, Bornstein also worked for a decade as an architectural draftsperson, giving him a deep well of homes and structures to draw upon for his compositions. Layering scenes within scenes, the paintings reveal the overlapping of paint, process, memory and narrative necessary to comprise a visual story. The motifs recurring throughout the compositions and the artist's broader practice - kites, masks, parachutes, instruments, planes, drawings, patterned garments, etc. - reflect the free flowing and ever-evolving nature of the creative process itself, exalting art's ability to open up worlds within worlds.

Sam Bornstein (b. 1983, New York; works in New York. MFA Hunter College 2017, BFA Bard College 2005). Bornstein's layered figurative paintings evoke an invented world that mirrors contemporary life and personal narratives through the filter of the imagined. In alternately luminous and muted light, a variety of characters from New York City, folklore, media, and the collective imaginary coexist in scenes that are familiar, yet resist closed readings. Recent solo exhibitions of the artist's work include Astral Blue at Embajada, San Juan, Puerto Rico (July 2023) and Variety Lofts at Charles Moffett, New York, NY (March 2022). He has exhibited extensively in group shows nationally and internationally including at Salon 8 Salon, Hamburg, Germany (2022), McBride Contemporain, Montreal, Canada (2022); Bass & Reiner, San Francisco, CA (2020); Alta, Malmö, Sweden; and, Contra Gallery, Zagreb, Croatia (2018), among others.