Send N*des

Galleri Urbane is pleased to present Send N*udes, a solo exhibition of work by Drea Cofield, drawing from her ongoing “selfie” project.

“The landscape has always been a landing point for me, as a subject, as a metaphor for the body, a metaphor for a psychological space, and also a place on which to project desire,” she says.

The idea of the body as landscape characterizes the almost handheld-size, intimately scaled paintings on shellacked cardboard which she began making in graduate school. Each work is based on a photograph sent to her, an erotic nude taken to give to a lover or keep for oneself.

Ideas of intimacy and exhibitionism are negotiated through the constellations of objects in interior spaces, always with a mirror, always with natural light that bathes both body and objects. “The play of light through the space and the intimacy in the play of things that are in the space or are in conversation with the body” becomes the province of Cofield’s paintings, which act as prisms through which to refract notions of intangibility and representation, even as the individual and the collective intersect.

“How do you elicit desire? What is desire?” Cofield’s work asks. And what right have we to witness? The pictures, sans narrative, act as framing devices for what are essentially investigations of selfhood; lingering with the brush on what is usually sublimated, they explore liminal spaces, the uncanny, and the presence of a libidinal gaze. They seize scenes in a state between invitation and reply. The painter’s point of view is a surrogate: the viewer is no longer merely a viewer, but an audience—and potential creator of meaning. “It’s absolutely a kind of mirror box in that way,” Cofield says. And in this way, it is reminiscent of other “boxes,” other intimately scaled works: the quiet, domestic interiors of Johannes Vermeer or the stunning early 19th-century erotic miniature “Beauty Revealed,” by American painter Sarah Goodridge. “It’s very charged,” the artist says of the gap between rendering and reality. The same can be said of the witnessing: confronted with a private moment and visceral image, the viewer is both insider and outsider, both lover and voyeur.

Drea Cofield is an artist currently working in Brooklyn, NY. She has exhibited in the U.S. and internationally including NewYork, Los Angeles, and Italy. Her work has been featured in the Brooklyn Rail, Artnet News, Juxtapoz, and Contemporary Painting (World of Art). She is the recipient of an Elizabeth Greenshields Grant and the Yale University Gloucester Painting Prize. Residencies include the Guild of Adventure Painters SWAB Mobile Residency in 2019. She is the Founder and Director of Bomb Pop-Up, a pop-up art and music initiative that focuses on emerging and established artists and musicians. It works with 200 artists from all over the world and collaborates with institutions such as the National Academy of Design. Cofield received her B.A. from DePaux University (Greencastle, IN) in 2008 and her M.F.A from Yale School of Art (New Haven, CT), in 2013.