Cindy Rucker Gallery is pleased to present new works by Brooklyn-based artist Frederick Hayes. In this exhibition, Hayes continues to explore the representation of the self and the urban landscape through abstraction, likeness, and difference. Using different media, Hayes intends to shed light on the human condition as it relates to the working-class African Americans, as well as larger communities of men and women. Raised in the South as part of a family that watched the 6-o’clock news, read Ebony and Jet, as well as the local newspapers, Hayes developed a strong interest in picture-making—the basic ideas of looking, recording, and interpreting—and portraiture early on. Through painting and drawing, Hayes creates ad hoc communities where the good and the bad, the heroes and the villains coexist; much like in reality, his characters possess diverse personalities, habits, and ways of seeing the world. His sculptural practice, on the other hand, is steered by a more open exploration of abstraction, where the verticality and geometry of the landscape marries the detritus of the city, the direct result of his wanderings through different neighborhoods. “Because no one really knows thyself,” the artist writes, images of the self “constantly morph from one image to the next, providing a glimpse before reshaping into something else.” “As a child we learn to present ourselves the way we want people to see us, but not always how we really are,” he states, suggesting that self is bound to be an ongoing, life-long process.

Frederick Hayes

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I am a visual artist currently based in New York, since 2001. I moved here after spending the early part of my career in California where I studied at the San Francisco Art Institute majoring in painting and drawing. Under the instruction and guidance of some of the leading figures in Bay Area Art at the time including Robert Colescott, Julius Hatofsky, and Richard Berger my worked developed its unique expressionist style. Later, I added sculpture which has sense become a significant part of my practice. Part idea base, personal experience, and intuitively designed encompassing the notion of working class African American day to day existence, labor (forced) and the class struggle. I am inspired by the works of Emile Nolde, Max Beckmann and the French Favues painters who placed emphasis on strong paint quality in lieu of exactness as well as the untrained artist of south who use whatever tools and materials are at hand to transform their environment through art making. The photograph plays a key roll as well to draw from literally and figuratively new images based on a realness. While the drawing and paintings address representation in a practical sense the abstractness of the sculptural works often focus on states of being that anthropomorphize and activates that realness. Each work as another layer and a difference layer, yet each addressing the sameness of humanity.