Sean Healy | Beautiful Downer

June 6 - July 13, 2019

Opening Reception: June 6, 6 - 8 pm

Multidisciplinary artist Sean Healy explores themes of societal and internal conflict, fear-based politics and human vulnerability in Beautiful Downer. Featured artworks include a selection of Healy’s dynamic sculptures, paintings and installations that resonate with straightforward honesty and poignancy.

Sean Healy’s practice incorporates painting, drawing, sculpture and installation, and his material experimentation is at the core of his intensive art-making process. For Polygraph, Healy uses an elaborate grid of sharpened pencils as a drawing instrument, and his resulting imagery resembles the lines of a polygraph test. Thick graphite marks from the artist’s bodily reach ascend and descend onto a massive horizontal sheet of paper, creating a gestural imprint that appears both revelatory and enigmatic. For the exhibition, Healy extends his drawing onto the gallery walls as memory and residue of his activation.

Sean Healy has been exhibiting with Elizabeth Leach Gallery since 1999, and his artworks have also been shown at Betty Moody Gallery (Houston, TX), Anderson Ranch Arts Center (Snowmass, CO), East/West Project, Dam, Stuhltrager/Gallery Homeland (Berlin, Germany) and The Art Gym (Marylhurst, OR). He has received several important public commissions, including the Wayne L. Morse Courthouse (Eugene, OR), Pioneer Place (Portland, OR), the General Services Administration Headquarters (Eugene, OR) and the FBI Headquarters (Houston, TX). In 2006, The Elizabeth Leach Gallery published a comprehensive catalogue on his work featuring an essay by Stephanie Snyder, curator of the Cooley Gallery at Reed College (Portland, OR).