Casey Bolding’s materially and conceptually rich paintings explore entropy and the passage of time, suggesting correspondences between his complex deployment of materials – oil and acrylic, but also flashe, plaster, repurposed wood – and the construction or deterioration of memory. Fluidly traversing interior and exterior worlds, the artist’s works imperfectly recall personal memories evoked by photographs and other forms of ephemera, encompassing figures that emerge from vast landscapes or reside in intimate domestic settings. As if to accentuate these works’ lingering sense of psychological interiority, Bolding's subjects may shift dramatically in scale, situating us within a perpetually changing mental and temporal landscape. 

This exploration of temporality often appears nearly archeological, the organic product of an oscillating process between accumulation and excavation. Bolding builds up his surfaces with industrial paint and plaster, later subjecting them to a vigorous process of scraping away, reworking, and reconfiguring. A self-taught artist, Bolding may indeed be invested in legacies of figuration after Milton Avery – and influenced by the sweep of American modernist painting more broadly – yet he seems to draw just as often from forms of making learned before entering the realm of contemporary art. It is difficult not to see in his use of plaster, for instance, his past work for a faux finishing company. His works are likewise informed by years spent painting murals and writing graffiti outdoors, typically in abandoned buildings and on freight trains. Sensitive to such sites, he approaches the canvas as he would an empty wall he might happen upon, one that's seductively cracked, sun-bleached, and stained by the elements. Disuse and disrepair are not pejorative terms here, but rather fundamental aspects of a practice that meditates upon the evolution of perception through time. For Bolding, there is also pleasure in using quotidian, economical materials: inexpensive house paints; acid-hued aerosols; frames built from reclaimed wood. There is freedom in gleaning leftover materials and putting them back to work, in recovering the discarded and overlooked, just as there is poignancy in time's ability to change and undo and remake the past.

Bolding (b. 1987, Denver, CO) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His work has been included in exhibitions at Polina Berlin Gallery, New York (2025, 2024); Karma, Thomaston, ME (2025); Pond Society, Shanghai (2025); Jack Siebert Projects, Los Angeles (2025); Shoot the Lobster, New York (2023); Mamoth, London (2022); and 1969 Gallery, New York (2019).