The Santa Monica Museum of Art presents Project Room: Daniel Cummings: Recent Paintings on view January 21-April 16, 2011.

Daniel Cummings: Recent Paintings is the artist’s first museum exhibition. Cummings (b. 1980) is a graduate of the MFA program at UCLA in sculpture, where he transferred his interest in 3-dimensional objects to painting. His abstract work plays with space and color in a variety of scales. The result: Deceptively simple, formal compositions that belie complex figure/ground relationships.

This exhibition will feature six new works that investigate surface and pictorial depth, as well as the space between abstraction and figuration. In works like Metro, figures seem to emerge from shadowy environments, alluding to deep space and movement. Works like Untitled-with its central, ghostly, soft pink blur placed on background shapes in orange, blue, white, and black-deftly combine loose and semi-transparent washes with carefully wrought pictorial structure. Born in Pittsburgh, he lives and works in Los Angeles.

Image: Daniel Cummings, Wadi, 2010, Oil on canvas, 75 x 54 inches, Courtesy the artist and ACME., Los Angeles

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