CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/6/2018

Celebrate Pride Month with the recently rediscovered paintings of Patrick Angus

"J.B. in Drag (Standing)" (1988) is reproduced from Patrick Angus: Painting and Drawings, Hatje Cantz's substantial recent monograph on Angus, who died in 1992 having suffered from AIDS. Essayist Douglas Blair Turnbaugh writes, "I am afraid that Angus, rejected at the time by the art market, had been tricked by his huge talent and his tremendous art culture; his constant desire to be always excellent, never giving up the dream of a great style or the mirage of formal perfection—this can be called conservatism only by a blind or superficial viewer. On the contrary: this is the proof of his original faith in painting, untouched by those hesitations or false consciousness that drew so many artists to paint badly in order to justify painting again. Angus is a true, totally conscious postmodernist painter, and yet he is a difficult one, concerned with researching his personal language with authentic irony and no need of special or rhetorical effects. His voice is constantly high, clear, elegant, and unique."