Opening Reception: Friday, May 2nd, 2025, 6-8pm

Auxier Kline is pleased to present Lucid, a show of new paintings by the Brooklyn based artist, Dylan Hurwitz. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. 

This latest body of work started with a simple premise: over the course of the past year; Hurwitz invited friends to his studio to nap, painting their portraits during the duration of their rest. The tangerine colored studio couch on which the sitters sleep sets the palette for the paintings, which have a tawny glow. A limited palette of oranges, purples, and yellow pastels imbue the works with softness and warmth. 

While encouraging those posing to rest and sleep, Hurwitz is working from observation, creating  a contrast between the stillness of the sleeper and the hurry to finish painting before they stir. The resulting paintings are closely cropped portraits, though in a few cases, we see beyond to a shoulder, chest, or an arm.  It is unclear whether it is day or night in many of the portraits. Each is painted with the attentiveness of watching one’s partner rest. The closed eyes imply an interiority, dreaming, and repose. 

In order to create these portraits, there was a vulnerability and trust that was required between the slumbering male subjects and the artist.  Like the painters Sylvia Sleigh and Martha Edelhiet, influences for the artist, these paintings further investigate and respond to the ways in which men have been historically depicted in art history. These suite of paintings also bring to mind one of Andy Warhol’s first experimental films, Sleep from 1964, in which the artist filmed at close range the face of his then lover during a bout of sleep.  

The sleeping portraits are paired with one larger painting on canvas, the pink studio. We see the orange couch upon which the subjects napped while being painted by Hurwitz. Behind the couch is a nighttime view out of the artist’s studio window in Brooklyn, with the elevated J train flying by. This is the only suggestion of movement within the series, and of time passing. As opposed to purely a place of production,  Hurwitz is interested in the idea of the studio as a place of respite, creating a contrast between the murky dark view out the window, and the warmth of the interior of the studio, and couch.