Alannah Farrell: Erect

Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown, presents Alannah Farrell: Erect, an exhibition of recent works on paper. For the artist, the show’s title is a personal tribute to Emily Brontë, who wrote, “Having levelled my palace, don’t erect a hovel and admire your own charity …”

Inspired by the eerie imagery of George Tooker and Hans Bellmer, Farrell’s intimate depictions of their life simultaneously appear as near-cinematic scenes rife with psychodrama. Looming high rises are a recurring motif in these new portraits, tableaus, and cityscapes. Alluding to volatility and change, these towering forms—constantly rising and falling to redefine the city’s skyline—emerge as metaphors for the human body.

Collapsing interiority with exteriority, Farrell draws parallels between the city’s transformation and their queer and trans communities. Their compositions build on queer theoretical frameworks from the 1990s to the present day by foregrounding identity as a concept indelibly informed by location and experience. Reflecting this, paintings like Estate (2024) layer a mirror image of the artist’s silhouette over a nighttime cityscape to blur distinctions between figure and ground. “Painting might attempt a facsimile of reality,” Farrell explains, “… [but it] always deviate[s] and become[s] something else.”

Farrell’s new compositions capture sensations of seclusion and instability, while describing the search for collectivism. Cumulatively, the exhibition’s works probe, in the artist’s words, “What does the journey of shattering and shedding indoctrinated false binaries and oppressive systems look like in this moment? How is that search for liberation contained, built, and destroyed in our current structures?” For Farrell, “Painting is one way of searching, trying to survive, peeling back layers of bullshit, shedding skins … Often, I feel I'm only just getting started. That's when it gets exciting.”

Alannah Farrell (b. 1988, Kingston, NY) is a queer painter who lives and works in New York, NY. Farrell completed their BFA at The Cooper Union, New York, NY. They have presented their work in solo and group exhibitions at Anat Egbi, Los Angeles, CA and New York, NY; Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX; Lyles and King, New York, NY; Alexander Gray Associates, New York, NY; Harper’s, New York, NY; Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; The Painting Center, New York, NY; Theirry Goldberg Gallery, New York, NY; and UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, CA. Their work is in the permanent collection of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL. They are represented by Anat Egbi, Los Angeles.