mui B E N T O
opening reception :
JULY 25 - afternoon
ANOTHER GRAND CANYON
oil paintings by MIKE FRICK
A show of recent work by Santa Fe Artist Mike Frick. Featuring the abstracted peoples, places, and perceptions of Grand Canyon.
An avid hiker and backpacking guide—Frick’s decades in the field meet the canvas in abstracted landscapes and hazy figures. Initially appearing as simple compositions, the depth of layered shapes, forms, and inscriptions invokes a frantic emotive quality. The work as a whole is a meditation on simple complexities.
His dry sense of humor, clever and foreboding, shows in the shifting expressions of his figurative work—smiling faces that could be crying. Identities and experiences lost to time, history, and our own mortality.
Tears in laughter, floods in the desert…the fleeting moments of campfire stories, whispering canyons, and shifting celestial bodies. These paintings evoke a sense of curiosity. There is a playfulness — a game of seeing the unseen, witnessing a version of reality that maybe never was, but very much is.
Frick is an observer who holds a fun-house mirror to the surrounding world forcing us to look again, to look harder, to look deeper into expressions of the people, places, and moments that he captures with humor, sadness, and a strange affection that keeps the viewer looking for more.
Come see for yourself as they are meant to be, live.