Michael Henry Hayden

Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present Rocks & Windows, an exhibition of new works on paper by Los Angeles-based artist Michael Henry Hayden. This exhibition is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, and will be installed in our Viewing Room from March 30 - May 11, 2024.

In Rocks & Windows, Michael Henry Hayden uses an array of differently treated papers as found elements to build compositions that sensitively fuse allusions to the natural landscape with the built environment. As in his approach to painting and sculpture, the artist here intertwines concerns of material and surface to create a series of poetic pictorial spaces that each feel at once like a grand vista and the microscopic contents of a petri dish.

The artist conceived of the seven works on view during an extended stay in Japan throughout the fall of 2023. Taken with fresh visual influences and the remarkable regional materials newly available to him, he began to experiment with the unique properties inherent to traditional handmade Japanese papers alongside those of commercial machine-made papers. In the resulting works he mixes the two, exploiting the possibilities that each affords; acrylic ink repelled by synthetic propylene sheets beads up on the surface, while it reliably dissipates softly into natural mulberry fibers.

With composition and illusory effect, these works set the unpredictable and changeable qualities of nature directly against perceived orders of domesticity. A grid of textured paper, for instance, suggests a glass facade of an urban high-rise building, and simultaneously evokes granite cliffs against a blue sky; the volatility of weather is perhaps reflected in the skyscraper’s false permanence. In other works, the grandeur of a mountainscape is reduced to crumbled paper, and transparent panes of airy color imply a screen hiding a distant wall. In Weeping Rock, a sheer curtain becomes a waterfall that cascades down a series of rocky shelves, while in The Red Room, a magnetic red glow emanating from a form that reads like a window stands in as a portal between conflicts of the mind and a litany of daily-escalating nightmares unfolding outside. In the absence of true depiction, the artist brings the nuance of tension into extraordinary focus.