Keith Boadwee: How Much is that Froggy in the Window? : WINDOW, 91 Walker Street New York, NY (corner of Walker and Lafayette Street)

California artist Keith Boadwee returns to New York for the first time since his spectacular joint exhibition with Nicole Eisenman at the FLAG Art Foundation in 2020/21. At WINDOW, Boadwee presents How Much is that Froggy in the Window? which features portraits of frogs, poodles, and emo kids in various poses of reflection while vaping, smoking, holding flowers, or getting ready for a boozy drink. Boadwee, known for his transgressive, psychosexual work that has tested social conventions and acquainted viewers with rebellious subject matter and the artist’s bodily functions as a means to paint, has recently focused on a cast of rather relaxed protagonists whose only predilection for bodily fluids is hinted at in their fondness for the occasional plume of cigarette smoke or water spill.

In 2015, Boadwee started painting frogs, as an homage to a Viennese Actionist painting entitled “Froschkönig,” a naughty adaptation of the Brothers Grimm’s fairytale “The Frog Prince.” Gradually, Boadwee lead his amphibian figures away from overtly sexual overtones to develop a cast of characters equally startling and feisty yet reserved and cheeky. Poodles started entering the menagerie adding undisguised cuteness and symmetry to the intricately fractured compositions. The emo kids evolved as a response to a new gender landscape that has emerged strongly in the last decade. Smoking has been replaced with vaping, the oral fixation remaining strongly in place. Flowers with bent stems are forced to find space within the confines of the canvas, thereby responding to the paintings’ own formal parameters, as opposed to creating the illusion of looking through a window frame into an ideal world. The cartoonish appearance of Boadwee’s paintings, implying a satirical but sincere undertow, is complemented by a rigorous formal grammar of symmetry, flat color planes, breaks in line logic, and simplification of shapes and form.

K.B.: ‘I used to worry my tombstone would say, “Here lies Keith Boadwee, the butthole painter,” but I think people know me better than that now.