ANDREW RAFACZ is pleased to announce Outside Group, new paintings by Philip Vanderhyden in Gallery One.

Chicago, IL, February 5, 2011- ANDREW RAFACZ begins the 2011 season with Outside Group, new paintings by Philip Vanderhyden. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. It continues through Saturday, March 19, 2011.

Philip Vanderhyden continues his ongoing investigation into the manner in which a painting makes contact with its surroundings. Making use of sets of varying techniques, his new group of paintings can be addressed simultaneously as separate objects and as a single work. As much as they demonstrate a closeness and separation from one another, the works, which are installed on a single wall, emphasize, as a whole, a distance from and proximity to their audience.

Vertically facing the open space on the long horizontal expanse of the gallery wall, the works are meant to evoke decollage and black and white halftone printing, while the surfaces bring to mind the compression and tactility of the more direct techniques of process-based paintings from late modernist abstraction and Support Surface painting of the 1970’s.

Much like his previous groups of paintings, Vanderhyden alludes to modernist painting not through citation and pastiche but by a unified single image that compresses contradictory impulses into an uninterrupted field. The cold sensuality of the surfaces, while at first unyielding, gives way to shallow, evocative depth: the surface of the painting tears itself up into a pattern of noise. The artist creates a painting that holds uneasily within the confines of the frame; at once appearing to be a cropped image, like a badly composed and developed photograph, while simultaneously clinging to its dark edges, which stamp themselves aggressively against the white of the gallery space.

PHILIP VANDERHYDEN (American, b. 1978) lives and works in New York. He received his M.F.A. from Northwestern University in 2004. Recent solo exhibitions include New Paintings at CTRL in Houston in 2010 and Light & Sie in Dallas in 2009. He exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis with Douglas Ross, in 2009. Recent group exhibitions include I Speak Now from the Aesthetic and Artistic Point of View When I Say that Life with Michelle Grabner is Dull, curated by Michelle Grabner, at Leo Koenig, New York, and Gradation, curated by Garth Weiser, in Lisbon, Portugal, both in 2010. His work can also be currently seen in Large Abstractions at The Suburban, Oak Park, which he also curated.