Michael McGregor - "Voyage Voyage"

Hashimoto Contemporary is pleased to announce Voyage Voyage, a solo exhibition by LA-based artist Michel McGregor that explores the aesthetics of travel. Expanding on themes of leisure, luxury, and memory from his monograph ROOM SERVICE (Paragon Books), this exhibition of vibrant oil paintings and “point and shoot” drawings on hotel stationery invites viewers into a world that embraces fact, fiction, and fantasy, threading a needle between irony and sincerity, art and artifice. 

Employing brazen gestures and a vivid palette, McGregor cross-references civilian, cinematic and commercial representations of travel in a series of new paintings and works on paper that confuse reality, fantasy, and desire. Building an atmosphere and color palette from sources like Henry Miller’s 1941 travelog Colossus of Maroussi, Federico Fellini’s film Amarcord, and the creamy hue of Venetian architecture, McGregor recontextualizes that which is ubiquitous and familiar, making the unremarkable glow anew in a foreign light. In homage and with great reverence for the Impressionist and Fauvist painters who developed the genre for the modern age, the painter applies paint directly from the tube, reveals the underpaintings on raw canvas, and captures scenes “en plein air.” In subject matter and technique, McGregor links himself to the history of portraying the world with reverence, optimism, and subtle critique.

The drawings immediately and intimately capture the fleeting moments of travel, while his paintings offer more clarified representations of places and moments, retaining the familiarity of a scene while shifting its essence into something novel, something distinctly different. Having spent the last year oscillating between Corfu, Hydra, Athens, Paris, the South of France, and Sicily, McGregor’s flâneur observations playfully toy with European still life tradition, elevating food, toiletries, travel magazines, and other scenes of life from commonplace to romantic.