Rick Prol’s WEEGEE at Grey Art Gallery in Williamsport, PA

By matthew rose

April 9, 2012   ·   4 Comments

Rick Prol installing WEEGEE at the Grey Art Gallery in Williamsport, PA.

Rick Prol’s “Weegee” at the Grey Art Gallery in Williamsport, PA is a throwback to a New York when the world was black and white and crime scenes dominated the news, the streets and the public’s imagination.  The artist whose career surfaced from the rubble of the East Village scene in the 1980s, captured a similar sort of crime world with his own art.  Like Weegee (Arthur Fellig) who roamed New York’s Lower East Side looking for, finding and dramatizing death, Prol is also a legend who scratched the surfaces and came up with something equally unsettling and equally beautiful.  He’s still at it: “Weegee” imbues New York’s landscape with his iconic “cartoon expressionism,” and a world of hot paint featuring cat-like losers with broken bottles, knives and nails in their necks and heads. Here his characters attempting to cross New York City on a broken down bicycle sink into a nuclear slime; buses fly through a blood red post-apocalyptic sky, soldiers advance legless, bodies pile up along brick walls, and cars are stacked on top of each other, rusting into eternity.  There’s no hope in this Weegee World, but the brutality of living grinds on. And there’s a beauty to it all. Rick Prol: “Weegee,” on view from April 5 – May 12, 2012.  See Grey Art Gallery  for more gallery images and exhibition details; download the PDF catalog here.

Tags: 1980s New York Art, Cartoon Expressionism, East Village, grey art gallery, matthew rose, Rick Prol, Weegee

4 Responses to “Rick Prol’s WEEGEE at Grey Art Gallery in Williamsport, PA”

1. rick prol says:

   April 9, 2012 at 11:49 am

   Thanks so much Matthew for this wonderful essay of yours on my current show and works at the Grey Art Gallery. On the 19th of May I will be having a retrospective exhibit at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art. It will run concurrently with the “Circa 1986″ exhibit that is up now and which I am also included in. MERCI!!!!
2. Aristedes DuVal says:

   April 9, 2012 at 12:02 pm

   looking forward to seing U @ Hudson Valley Center! Let me know details. perhaps yer havin’ another event @ Grey? (Anything to get out of the City!)
3. Aristedes DuVal says:

   April 9, 2012 at 12:02 pm

   & we should get together to play some music….
4. rick prol says:

   April 9, 2012 at 12:53 pm

   You got it Aristedes!!!