Daydream Workshop

03 November–22 December, 2018

Sam Bornstein

Charles Moffett is pleased to present Daydream Workshop, a solo exhibition of recent paintings by New York-based artist Sam Bornstein. The exhibition marks the artist's first solo show in New York and features a series of new figurative paintings.

Daydream Workshop is an imagined world of people at work and partaking in moments of leisure. They are occupied by ambiguous activities ranging from the absurd to the deadpan and banal. The fabricated scenes and imagined figures merge to exist in tension with the texture and light of the painted field, areas in which the artist started the composition by painting abstractly: scraping, pouring, screen-printing, stenciling and sanding, working and reworking the surface of each picture.

Bornstein's paintings create an atemporal narrative space that flirts with a reality seemingly familiar to any viewer, yet is difficult to place. They tend to exist somewhere between a dream and the subconscious' translation of waking life, which beckons the viewer to apply their own experiences to complete the narrative. To facilitate this interaction the artist has used a variety of traditional and contemporary paint applications, evoking various sensations of physical motion and time, as well as suggesting a range of eras.

Populated with workers, soldiers, and people engaged in everyday moments, Bornstein's invented worlds recall contemporary life, as well as an omnipresent past. Traveling extensively through Northern, Central and Eastern Europe over the last few years, Bornstein focused his attention on studying Postwar and Modernist painters from these regions. Over the course of his journey through countries like Poland, Germany and Hungary, the artist encountered folkloric literature relating to his Ashkenazi heritage. With its integration of narrative symbolism, humor and the supernatural it greatly influenced his practice as evidenced in Daydream Workshop.

Sam Bornstein earned a BFA from Bard College in 2005 and an MFA from Hunter College in 2017. Recent projects and exhibitions include those at Honey Ramka, Brooklyn; Underdonk, Brooklyn; 7 Herkimer Place, Brooklyn; Ground Floor Contemporary, Birmingham; Bass & Reiner, San Francisco; Ærø Kunsthal Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, Contra Gallery, Croatia; and Galerie Moderne Silkeborg, Denmark.