Escape From Reality

A new group show at Rehs Contemporary in New York asks viewers to unleash their imaginations.

- Michael Clawson

The real world has an endless supply of subject matter, from the most crowded Manhattan street corner to the most desolate Himalayan peak, where the nearest human is not only far from view, but beyond the curvature of the earth. Subjects can be people in an artist’s life, fruit from their local grocery store, or the store itself, its fluorescent aisles lined with stacked food items. They can be abstract ideas rendered into blocks of color, or hyper-detailed photorealism, in which paint is applied with almost microscopic accuracy. The one constant, though, is reality—subjects are drawn from the real world, an observable place governed by fixed systems that answer to biology, chemistry, physics, gravity and other aspects of the physical world.

But reality has its limitations. Its borders don’t just have edges, but also impermeable barriers, and rules don’t break easily, if at all. To transcend beyond these barriers artists have for centuries turned to their imaginations to transport them and their work beyond the realm of the real, into a  dimension of fairytale and fantasy. On April 28, Rehs Contemporary in New York City will dive deep into the genre of contemporary imaginative realism with Imagine, a new group exhibition that will present works that stray far from the world we inhabit.