McKenzie Fine Art

55 Orchard Street, New York, New York 10002 212 989 5467

	Jeffrey Bishop Mason Dowling January 29 - March 8, 2026
	view exhibition	McKenzie Fine Art is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition of recent abstract paintings by New York-based artists Jeffrey Bishop and Mason Dowling. This will be the first exhibition at the gallery for both artists, and Dowling’s New York City debut. Two large-scale examples from the Fathom Compression series by Jeffrey Bishop anchor his contribution to the exhibition. In these mysterious and powerful works, both controlled and aleatory, a symmetrically placed, alien-like image is submerged within an inky, liquid turbulence. The digitally created central form, screen-printed onto a synthetic substrate, is both anthropomorphic and totemic. Bishop subsequently flooded the surface with ink, left undisturbed and allowed to settle into channels, canals, and black pools. Bishop’s Sidewinder series is named for the Lee Morgan hard bop jazz composition. Colorful and small in scale, the paintings also feature enigmatic central forms screen-printed onto rice paper and applied to collaged and painted fields. With emphatic spatial play and scale shifts, the resultant works can be read as either playful and lively, or menacing and disturbing. A third body of work, his Interval series, evokes geology, revealing the artist’s interest in both physics and music. Rendered mostly in grisaille, their surfaces suggest magma and igneous rock, with forms fractured by time and erosion. Contrasting light quadrangular shapes skim the surface, with occasional metallic protrusions suggesting ruptures. Mason Dowling’s imagery begins with drawing. Using forms sampled from previous work and direct observation, his drawings are partially cut, with the irregular shapes gessoed onto his paintings. Thin layers of translucent acrylic paint are then applied to the entire surface with simple cardboard squeegees, working as a printmaker would, from dark to light or light to dark. The resulting hybrid surface has both positive and negative space, each with different material capabilities. The interaction of delicate relief with accumulating, multi-colored, and luminous color passages lends each work a distinctive complexity, suggesting both biomorphic and cosmic entities. Having been raised in the high desert of New Mexico, the abstract imagery reflects his interest in the weathering and erosion of the landscape, the visual rhythms of exposed and subterranean geologies, sedimentary striations, and fossil structures. His titles likewise reference significant locations in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, their flora and fauna, as well as his interest in particle physics and folk music. Jeffrey Bishop received his BFA at Tufts University and his MFA at the University of Washington, Seattle. He has exhibited his work in gallery and museum shows throughout the US, and in Russia and China, since the mid-1970s. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, Artforum, Two Coats of Paint, and theSeattle Times, among many others, and his works are in the permanent collections of the Seattle Art Museum, the Henry Art Gallery and the Tacoma Art Museum. Mason Dowling holds a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from the University of South Florida, Tampa. His works have been exhibited since 2019 in San Francisco, Tampa, Berlin, Germany, and Kingston, NY. He participated in the invitational residency Indeterminacy Incubator on Governor’s Island in 2024 and co-directed the curatorial project Hardware Applied Services from 2018 to 2020 in Bellingham, WA.

55 Orchard Street, New York, New York 10002 212 989 5467
email info@mckenziefineart.com