04/25/2026
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Bobby Morebedβ
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April 24th to May 29th, 2026β
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Snow Gallery is pleased to present new paintings by Bobby Morebed, his firstβ solo gallery show.β
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Morebed works in a lineage of American transgression running from John Waters to Mike Kelley: bad taste as method, abjection as structure. But where Waters narrates, Morebed reduces. His images strip down to emblemβfigures held in a tense, confrontational stillness.β
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The paintings engage the legacy of 1990s figurationβJohn Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, Karen Kilimnik, Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans, Lisa Yuskavageβ while refusing their composure. Bodies are bound, exposed, exaggerated, grotesque: βnasty pretty.β The handling is blunt, even distressingβ part confession, part formal compulsion. Figures never seem like they settle; they oscillate between submission and performance. A central motif is the staging of plus-size bodies in scenarios of constraint and theatrical bo***ge. These figures are neither idealized nor neutral. They insist.β
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Morebedβs own languageβaο¬ectionate, crude, deliberately βincorrectββtracksβthe workβs volatility. The question is not whether it oο¬ends, but what kind ofβ
attachment it reveals: fixation, projection, desire that resists cleanup.β
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Structurally, Mike Kelley is the closer analogue. The body appears as a site ofβdamage and psychic residue. There are echoes of RE/Search Publicationsβitsβcatalog of taboo and subcultureβbut Morebed is not archival. The paintingsβfixate rather than document.β(Continued in comments)
