Earthminer

March 4—26, 2022 Opening: Friday March 4, 5—8 pm (New York, NY) Fragment Gallery, New York is pleased to introduce Kian McKeown with his first solo show, Earthminer. Utilizing a quotidian iconography of forms, Earthminer presents sculptural, drawing, and installation work, portraying desolate landscapes ravaged by impossible, surreal machines. Uncomfortably occupying a position between object and bodily form, McKeown’s surrealist figures present a landscape of longing, displacement, and unfulfilled desire. McKeown’s practice of contemporary surrealism divorces objects from their function while using biomorphic elements to reflect different emotive states.. Nervousness or uncertainty are often evoked through the use of misplaced and seemingly random symbolic forms. All of these sentiments act to characterize the figures of McKeown’s sculptures and drawings as struggling to exist and assimilate into the real world around them. The often violent landscapes and forms also allude to generational anxieties about a grim future of the environment. For the artist, Earthminer reflects the “frustrations about a quickly crumbling planet, viewed through the lens of a fictional and highly exaggerated world.” ABOUT THE ARTIST Kian McKeown (b 1999, New York) received a BFA from Cooper Union, where he has enjoyed both exhibitions and publications. He lives and works in New York City. ABOUT FRAGMENT As the only contemporary art gallery in the world with permanent spaces in Russia and the United States, Fragment occupies a unique position across two culturally, historically, and politically opposed centers of power. Helmed by Sergey Guschin and Anton Svyatsky, Fragment Gallery produces over twenty exhibitions per year in Moscow and New York, guided by a mission of promoting diverse emerging artists to an international audience, and facilitating visibility and institutional access to Eastern and Central European artists. Founded in Moscow in 2016 and expanded to New York City’s Lower East Side in 2021, the gallery’s dual positioning aims to build a bridge for cultural exchange and promote greater diversity in the Western-dominated cultural discourse. In 2020, Fragment founded Open Circle, the first gallery-sharing initiative in Russia that hosts prominent galleries and artists from around the world in an annual exhibition in Moscow, with plans to host the first New York edition of Open Circle in Summer 2022. Gallery partners for previous iterations of Open Circle include Lubov, Temnikova & Kasela, Peres Projects, Raster, Misako & Roisen, Capsule Shanghai.