McGrath Leaves the Suburbs Behind and Embraces the Bleak City

Tom McGrath’s new show at Zach Feuer Gallery exudes a chilled sense of distance and separation, especially in this weather. Dark urban grids stretch out to the horizon on massive canvasses that barely contain them. McGrath gives us a bleak urban wasteland, unwelcoming and indifferent in its bluntness. These sprawling cityscapes are viewed from above, as if from a plane soaring over a nighttime metropolis.

McGrath’s devotion to and involvement in his work is clear. He lays it on thick, spreading dark oil paints across the canvas. Meanwhile, glowing, electrical street grids are literally carved out of this layer. They expose the mottled underbelly of the canvas: colored splotches, paint drips, reds, yellows, and greens that are barely kept within the curbs McGrath has provided.

This show represents a shift in McGrath’s work. Gone are his homey views of warped suburbs, distorted strip malls, and good old American highways. Gone too are his familiar behind-the-wet-windshield perspectives from his driving paintings. In this show, he keeps some semblance of the view from within a machine (in this case it seems to be a plane instead of a car), though the effect is isolating and contemplative, and nowhere near as literal or nostalgic. He pushes away from such representation and becomes more aloof.

In the past few years, McGrath, a Columbia MFA graduate, has been criticized for his somewhat mundane subjects—cars, roads, and backyards in Connecticut—that don’t quite do his skill justice. But in this new show, McGrath’s third solo effort at Zach Feuer, he takes a big step in this direction. While it is unclear whether this change in subject represents growth and a shift in focus for McGrath, or a cold reaction to old complaints—or even the well deserved chip on the shoulder from former classmates like Dana Schutz—these new paintings stretch the boundaries of the street and the city, and our interactions with them. He leaves his old subjects in the sunny Connecticut dust.

This change is evident in Night Grid 5, where the looming city grid seems to grow angrier and more hostile as it approaches a hazy fog at the canvas edge. In TBT (orange and green), McGrath fizzles out the grid even more, allowing it to decay and be overwhelmed by thick green brushstrokes and chaos. It is here that the confined paint splatters from McGrath’s streets spill out freely. Rather than ask what has become of the modern landscape, he infuses it with tech and toxins, static street grids and border breakdowns.

McGrath’s new paintings are barely recognizable from his previous works. He continues with the idea of landscape, but lays his cheerful, distorted, and distinct frames to rest. While his old paintings, recalling humbling landscapes and spirited Impressionism, are missed, these new works show an important new edge to McGrath. He gives as much thought to how he is painting as to what and why—perhaps even more—and allows both formal aspects and subject matter to work and feed off each other. McGrath successfully brings landscape into a modern world. For him, it is one ruled by technology and the numbness of confronting a gaping urban surface. He expresses the inhospitable coldness of the new city, the imposition of its grid and scale, and the unstable chaos beneath it and at its periphery.