56 HENRY is pleased to announce Dorsia, a solo exhibition of work by Matthew Tully Dugan. The exhibition will be on view June 24 through June 26, 2022.

The exhibition title references a fictional restaurant made famous in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. Dorsia is so elusive that its interior is never actually revealed, only imagined. Dugan’s installation suspends this schism between representation, fantasy and authenticity, utilizing post-appropriative portraits of Kendall Jenner as literal stand-ins for late 80s Warhols hung at a Michelin starred hot-spot in downtown NY. By employing vivid colors and graphic compositions, Dugan reproduces images of an American pop icon through a distinctly American pop vernacular.

Dugan sets out to delineate the lifecycle of novel visual cues, guiding us from their syntheses in the primordial sludge of the fledgling pop-art scene and their inevitable breakthrough into the visual syntax, asking when stylistic impulses move from disruptive to ubiquitous to cliched. When did "it" transcend its bubble, breech the common consciousness and capture the public imagination to the degree it irrevocably entered into the decorative sphere, sealing it into the scenery of flat-pack furniture catalogs and prefab restaurant decor? Using the medium of the readymade as the message, Dugan invites us to inhabit the mindset of encountering pop-art in its nascent state.

The opening of Dorsia is befittingly sponsored by Kendall Jenner's own 818 Tequila.

Matthew Tully Dugan (b. 1986) is a New York born and based multidisciplinary artist. The artist’s interests span celebrity, psychology, pop iconography, privacy, and fanaticism. Dugan often employs promotional, social, and found imagery in a practice motivated by digital media’s physical and emotional divide. His paintings, sculptures, installations, texts, and curatorial projects collapse the popular and the subcultural, the collective and the personal, as a means of processing contemporary conditions and their impact on the psyche.