56 Henry is pleased to present Puddle Drinkers, an exhibition of new paintings by Clayton Schiff, on view June 8 through July 30, 2023 at 105 Henry Street. Puddle Drinkers marks Schiff's second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Schiff creates visually playful paintings with underlying sly, psychological twists. In a muted palette, he stages surreal visual narratives with anthropomorphic figures in familiar yet otherworldly places. His creatures occupy a wide array of emotional registers as they oscillate between public and private life, urban and natural settings, laborious and leisurely activities.

The eponymous Puddle Drinkers (2023) portrays characters eagerly lapping up water from polluted ponds in a barren landscape. Happily sharing the watery muck, a peaceable kingdom of creatures seem perfectly content living at a low level of existence. Consciously or unconsciously rendered, one abstractly shaped puddle resembles a devilish head or stricken steer’s skull, suggesting the nectar these creatures now relish might soon lead to their end.

Paint Job (2022) captures a young man-beast rolling white paint over the wall of a brown building while an older character observes through a window, casually smoking a cigarette. The painter seems to be taking pride in his work, even though his naked appearance could be perceived as humiliating—a state of mind that’s compounded by the apparent judgment from the man peering down on him from above. However, like Sisyphus the worker continues his task, which will likely be repeated over and over again, day after day.

Two additional paintings in the show strike a similarly existentialist tone. Seaside (2023) depicts a greenish, beached figure with all of the life seemingly sucked out of him. Sprawled on the shoreline, still grasping a strange sea creature, he appears traumatized by what he’s gone through to get there, yet also in a state of wonderment. Likewise, Face Time (2023) presents a nude, dog-faced man sitting on the edge of his bed, laughingly staring at his giant hand, which displays a wrinkly face grinning back at him. Dominating his existence in a lonely room, it could be his only partner or a means to something big—something that will free him from the life he endures.

Painting in layers of saturated pastel colors, Schiff shapes his surfaces with tweaks and revisions until there’s a fusion of bodies and lines, and everything’s working in tandem. Feathering the edge of the picture plane so that it floats within the canvas, the artist leaves us with a scene that could be real, but seems less like a concrete image and more like a drifting daydream.

Clayton Schiff (b. 1987) lives and works in New York. He received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2009. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Rubell Museum, Miami, FL; Harkawik, Los Angeles and 56 Henry, New York. Two-person and group exhibitions include Loyal, Stockholm, Sweden; Fisher Parrish, Brooklyn; Safe Gallery, Brooklyn; Nevven Gallery, Gothenburg, Sweden; and Nicelle Beauchene, New York.