Denzil Hurley Talk

Join artist Denzil Hurley for an artist talk and discussion on his series of Glyph paintings on display in zero, ground. In this series, monochrome canvasses are repeatedly layered with paint that is then partially scraped off to create tears and ruptures through their textured surfaces. Resembling protest placards, the paintings are mounted on found poles and broom handles, realizing assertive declarations of oblivion. These works were included in Hurley’s 2017 solo exhibition Disclosures at the Seattle Art Museum. Hurley will discuss the ways in which legacies of minimalism and abstraction influence his work, as well as ideas about protest, ingenuity and self censorship.

Denzil Hurley is an abstract painter based in Seattle. His interests in modular forms and structures involving squares and rectangles lead him to consider the interconnectivity and conjunctions of paintings and signs, material and meaning, presence and absence, and the languages of painting and speech. He earned his BFA at the Portland Museum Art School, Oregon, and his MFA at Yale University. Until 2017, he was professor of Painting and Drawing in the School of Art + Art History + Design at the University of Washington, Seattle where he taught for over two decades.