Frosch&Co is pleased to present Complicit, the gallery’s third solo show by New York based artist Jerry Kearns. The exhibition brings together three large multi-paneled paintings and a group of works on paper derived from figures in 1950s magazine advertising.

While the drawings in Complicit feature single portraits from magazine ads, the paintings combine imagery from mid-century cartoon language, advertising, and contemporary photography into a shared visual field. Across these works, Kearns examines the emergence of what has been described as a “culture of desire” in the postwar period and its persistence in the present.

Extending a long-term practice of historically grounded, psychologically informed art, the work considers how perception is shaped and manipulated, how images condition thought and produce the milieu through which experience is understood. Central to the work is a sustained engagement with the dialogue between perception and conception. Jerry Kearns treats images as a site where meaning is constructed, contested, and sustained.

Central to the artist is an understanding of art as a form of witness, an imperative to register and respond to the present, and to make visible its conditions. In this sense, painting and drawing operate as both record and intervention—a means of articulating realities that might otherwise remain obscured within the flow of representation.

Labeled as a political artist, Kearns thinks of himself as a conceptual artist making history-conscious, psychological art that repurposes familiar imagery from mediated culture—high and low—to record and respond to the social and spiritual realities of his time. He isolates and juxtaposes familiar images to highlight the psychological and philosophical content that informs personality and governs the direction of the social matrix.

The work in this exhibition is situated within a global rise of authoritarian movements and the increasing use of disinformation as a tool of political power. In the United States, far-right political forces have employed strategies of spectacle and repetition that shape public perception and erode shared reality.

Complicit is part of a witness and testimony, a record of this ongoing struggle, an attempt to tell our story in order to live. It reflects a belief in the evolutionary necessity of a conscious creativity.