Featured Exhibitions
[IN] OUT
August Krogan-Roley
Patricia Fleming Gallery
Installation view, [IN] OUT, August Krogan-Roley, Patricia Fleming Gallery, 2026
[IN] OUT
August Krogan-Roley
Patricia Fleming Gallery
04.04 – 09.05.2026
A suite of new acrylic paintings suspended on industrial fencing blocks and restrict access across the gallery, a nod to the sharper edges of the interior and the gallery’s location in Laurieston, Glasgow.
Krogan-Roley’s work is leading to a renewed appreciation of hyper-detailed imagery in contemporary painting. Here landscape is captured as still life, still life as a portrait, both are held simultaneously. Krogan-Roley extends his artistic practice through the precision of the artists’ hand, choosing acrylic on canvas to explore and question charged social themes. Across this series Krogan-Roley alludes to the rules and constraints of making residential space, primarily backyards.The paintings are at first joyful, the detritus of childhood play left behind, setting pure primary colours against each other. Purple next to green, dazzles to visually mimic our fast image saturated world.
Here the back, not the public facing facade holds the traces of all life having been lived. The absence of the human form quickly turns the mind to what type of event left everything suspended in time. The viewer has an elevated perspective, setting watchful neighbours against each other, resulting in a game of tug of war. Friendly or not, an unsettling hierarchy emerges. The homes in the paintings are not exclusively associated with one place or the other. You can imagine zooming in on each of the pictorial scenes and landing on a simple mat defining a well tended threshold. The desire to personalise and define our environment creates both hard and soft boundaries inside and out. This runs counter to urban planning’s New Modernism which imports minimalist aesthetics from ‘exemplar’ neighbourhoods from cities across the world. Around us we feel the shift and witness the erasure of decades of human moments given to the land, time spent with each other. The clean lines of the new developments are defined and slowly the site fences are replaced by neat rows of slatted wood.
The established boundaries across the back courts of Krogan-Roley’s paintings land in the gallery as transition zones constructed from steel. There is a cold edge alluding to going too far, the normalising of the gated community perhaps. Where in the name of ‘safety’, we become contained as do the messy lines and detritus left by the everyday lives of humans.
August Krogan-Roley (USA, b.1986 in Minneapolis, MN) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received a BFA in Painting and Printmaking at The Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, UK. Krogan-Roley has held solo exhibitions at institutions and galleries including Kogo, Tartu, EE; At Liberty, Hong Kong, CN; Ricou Gallery, Brussels, BE; Three Four Three Four Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Soo Visual Arts Center, Minneapolis and Generator Projects, Dundee, UK. His work has been exhibited at venues such as Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, UK; Margot Samel, New York, NY; Kate Werble Gallery, New York, NY; The Glue Factory, Glasgow, UK; RATA Projects, New York, NY; and Shoreditch Town Hall, London, UK.
Photo credit: Bart Urbanski