Edward Thorp Gallery is pleased to announce The Open Wide, an exhibition of new works by Neil Farber. This show will be the artist’s second solo show with the gallery.

For this exhibit Farber has produced a series of new individual mixed media on panel paintings as well as works on paper. The artist has become known for his provocatively produced statements; in The Open Wide he has continued to expand this singularly unique language, combined with the display of his innovative technical abilities.

In these new works, a profusion of mythological and psychological characters abound from our communal polyphony of eccentrics, here we find blob-headed figures, ghosts, mosquitoes, damsels (possibly in distress) and ghosts inhabiting environs of free floating ectoplasm made of snowy fields of white resin.

Often these works are accompanied by a stream of conscious handwriting recalling automatic surrealist poetry. These riotous parables are constructed with a visual depth making the paintings appear to shift in focus between layers achieved through an intricate process that involves pouring, stamping, staining, collage, building up with modeling paste, and gel mediums and wax.

With these unorthodox fractured narratives, Farber not only questions rationality but also continues to adeptly investigate our modern neurosis. Here, he further explores the line between humor and menace, and amusement and paranoia. The results add up to cautionary tales of modern alienation.

Neil Farber was born in 1974 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. a founding member of The Royal Art Lodge, an artist collective based in Winnipeg, Canada, Farber has recently exhibited individually at the La Maison Rouge, Paris, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, the Arken Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark, Pippy Houldsworth, London, Sies + Höke, Dusseldorf, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, the Center for Contemporary Art, New Orleans, and the Unviersity of North Texas Gallery. Works are in the collections of MoMA, New York and the West Collection, Pennsylvania and Olbricht Collection, Essen and Berlin. As part of the Royal Art Lodge, Farber has also exhibited at MoCA, Los Angeles, the Drawing Center, New York, the Power Plant, Toronto, De Vleeshall, the Netherlands, Seoul Museum of Art, Korea, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Ireland and was commissioned by the Liverpool Biennial in 2008 for a solo exhibition at the Bluecoat U.K.