Los Angeles-based painter Conor Thompson inaugurates The Middler’s second season with an exhibition titled “The Mouse”. Two new paintings will be presented alongside related works on paper and a limited edition zine made in collaboration with Swiss publisher Nieves.
Conor Thompson’s work explores the mutability of compositional and tonal space in a distinctly imagined painterly world. Materiality, abstraction and figuration are given equal billing in these visual echo chambers, where landscape tropes, contour lines, and the peripheral limits of the artist’s visual field are framed in distilled states of heightened color and restructured imagery.
For the exhibition, Thompson premiers The Mouse, a new painting that illustrates the artist’s narrative mode as well as his rich, wet-on-wet oil painting technique. The scene displays an environment of mysterious locality, a rodent pulling its long tail through a mouse hole set in a domestic space that is at once moonlit and heavily mouse-trapped.
Swiss publisher Nieves has published a limited edition zine for the occasion of the show, reproducing images from Thompson’s charcoal studies for The Mouse. Limited to 100 copies, the zine will be available for purchase directly from The Middler, and available from Nieves in-store and online.
“The Mouse” will be the artist’s second solo show in New York following “Head Over Heels” held at Greenpoint Terminal Gallery in 2015. Conor Thompson (b. 1983) holds a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (2005) and a MFA in painting from UC Irvine (2016), where he just presented his thesis show. He lives in Los Angeles.
Nieves is an independent publishing house based in Zurich, Switzerland. Founded in 2001, Nieves publishes artists’ books and zines.