A Lick Between The Eyes: Samantha McCurdy Solo Exhibition

Galleri Urbane is pleased to present A Lick Between the Eyes, an exhibition of new sculptural paintings by Samantha McCurdy. They represent a 10th anniversary show of an oeuvre the artist has been honing and which she here presents in exclusively large-scale pieces.

A sense of mystery and secrecy underlies McCurdy’s sculptural paintings. Their quiet, mute forms, products of skilled woodworking, are secretive: shapes protrude like enigmas from the volumes of stretched Spandex.

McCurdy paints the taut canvas repeatedly with acrylic paint—often up to 30 or 40 layers, achieving a nuanced, sturdy saturation: light and shadow catch the contours and hold the surfaces and hint at volume. Substantial and enigmatic, their quasi-matte surfaces create an illusionistic effect—the canvas skin can seem at once cast from solid metal and malleable, substantial and featherlight. A bewildering optical effect beckons the viewer closer. As such, they recontextualize the phenomenological experience of form and our perception of it. And yet the approach is simple: “I really just love shapes,” McCurdy says.

While color has been important to McCurdy—in compositions of pale pink, declensions of army green, sunshine yellow or orange—here she reunites her favorite chromatic selections from the past 10 years. They operate on various registers of shape, chromatic valence, and scale, with a delicate and deliberate attention to each in tandem with the others. Meanwhile, each “protrusion painting” becomes a membrane and portal, the demarcation of a very particular privacy. The shapes, often reminiscent of anatomy, have no prime mover behind them. And yet they offer themselves up to questioning what lies behind. “I love a little secret,” McCurdy says, and to deny the viewer the act–and pleasure–of unraveling the fabric of concealment would be a “missed opportunity for the imagination,” she says.

The title is emblematic of the artist’s 10-year rapport with pushing the boundaries of shape and structure: it references the comforting gesture of a mother cat whose kittens earn soothing. We are the kittens. The large-scale oeuvre are the mother cat. They invite us to be soothed.

Living and working in Los Angeles, Samantha McCurdy is a native of Philadelphia and graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Her work has been included in gallery exhibitions in Philadelphia, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Paris, and New York City. Samantha premiered a performance piece and had a solo booth at Spring/Break Art Fair L.A. and participated in the 2023 showcase presenting new sculpture. She was selected by the Standard Hotel curatorial staff to create a site-specific installation located in the lobby. She has exhibited with Galleri Urbane at the Dallas Art Fair, Aspen Art Fair, Art New York, and Untitled Art Fair in Miami. The current exhibition is her fourth solo at Galleri Urbane. In addition to her own practice, Samantha also runs an art space and intellectual pavilion called That That, which she uses to collaborate on and curate group and solo exhibitions with her peers.