# Rodney McMillian: Landscape in Red

URL: https://vielmetter.com/exhibitions/rodney-mcmillian-landscape-in-red/
September 2 — October 21, 2023 · Gallery I · Artists: Rodney McMillian

Installation photo credit: Brica Wilcox

**Opening reception: Saturday, September 16, 4 – 6PM**

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce Los Angeles-based artist Rodney McMillian’s solo exhibition *Landscape in Red*. The exhibition presents McMillian’s newest landscape paintings—a body of work the artist has explored for over two decades. The exhibition is on view from September 2 through October 21, 2023.

*Landscape in Red* is McMillian’s first exhibition in Los Angeles comprised solely of painting. Throughout his wide-ranging practice, McMillian has formally anchored his work through the use of color by navigating between conceptual and formal explorations of black, white, and red. These three colors have a fundamental and long-standing importance in his work.

Highlighting the color red and the multiple complex associations it evokes, these new paintings reference natural phenomena, the body (blood, viscera), and the political and social urgencies of the last few years. Several of the artist’s new works suggest the anguish of this transformation of the natural and social landscapes through the use of torrents of red paint leaching onto domestic bedding—calling out the existential crises affecting all of us every day, in our homes, beds, and couches where we reside as we watch the world ignite.

In the landscape paintings, the bedding also becomes a conceptual placeholder for absent bodies. As such, McMillian reviews the history of landscape painting and suggests a direct relationship between the landscape and the body—a relationship ripe with historical and political dimensions of brutality.

Throughout the artist’s career the color red has featured prominently in installations such as the 2008 solo presentation and performance *Untitled (a church)* at Artpace, San Antonio, and the Kitchen, New York; and in his major sculpture *From Asterisks in Docker*y (2012) included in*Blues for Smoke*, at MOCA Los Angeles in 2012 and in the traveling exhibition *The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse* first presented at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 2021 and later at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Colorado.