Thomas Trosch
Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Thomas Trosch. Over the past 30 years Trosch has developed a cult following for his energetic and curiously sensitive oil paintings that depict posh women in art-filled settings. Trosch began his career exhibiting regularly in New York and Los Angeles. Now, he lives in Baltimore and rarely releases his work. This will be his first solo show since 2017.
Thomas Trosch’s delightfully eccentric paintings function as both highly personal statements on an artist’s life among the privileged class and a critical riposte to the formal principles of modernism (or any “ism”, for that matter). Since his first exhibition in 1992, Trosch has depicted fancifully dressed women, art, and the rapaciousness of collecting with a skewed mannerism that transforms every figure into an abstraction and every abstraction into a burlesque.
This backdrop can be read on multiple levels. There are connections to styles and artists of the past. However, Trosch is not interested in creating a dialogue with historical forms so much as he is in reaching back in time to a Vogueinspired, mid-century heyday and imagining a world where bare-chested artists and art world doyennes conspire against the rigidity of heteronormative aesthetics.