Asher Liftin’s Recent Work turns ordinary scenes from daily life into images that ask viewers to slow down and look more carefully. The subjects in the exhibition are very familiar, including flowers, windows, parking lots, and city buildings. After Liftin’s process, these images begin to feel like a mix of photography and painting. From a distance, many of the works look like enlarged photographs or printed images. They appear complete and very precise. When viewers move closer, the images slowly break apart into dense lines, grids, and small areas of color.
He works from his own photographs and builds each image with layers of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. His process feels similar to weaving, because different colored lines and dots cross over each other and slowly form a complete image. In Lilies, the flower petals look soft and realistic from far away, but up close, many small layers of color become visible. In New York Window, the window frame, glass, interior space, and street reflections are also broken into small lines and colors, making an ordinary city window feel much more complex.
One of the most interesting parts of the exhibition is the way it changes how viewers look at painting. At first, viewers see a complete image that feels close to photography or print. Then they naturally move closer to understand how the image is built. As the viewing distance changes, the image shifts between a complete scene and scattered areas of color.
---Rita Chen
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