Public talk with Kyle Thurman & Diego Singh

A public talk with Kyle Thurman and Diego Singh will be held at CENTRAL FINE on July 27th, 2024 at 5 p.m.
CENTRAL FINE is pleased to announce Dream Police_Champion_render.1, a new artist edition by Kyle Thurman presented in a special short-term exhibition at the gallery. Shown alongside a painting from his Dream Police series, the edition expands on Thurman’s investigations of fantastical body armor via a booklet of texts, as well as a hooded sweatshirt designed by General Working Group.
After downloading TikTok during the COVID lockdown, the algorithm started feeding Thurman videos of a fandom that was 3D-printing body armor—primarily from the Marvel universe and first-person shooter games like Halo—then donning them in dramatically edited videos with smoke and smoldering ruins (all from the comfort of their bathroom mirrors). Dream Police, a series of monumental paintings shown at CENTRAL FINE in 2023 and which continue to be a central focus of Thurman’s practice, depicts figures clad in super-saturated colorful armor, lumbering through variegated nightscapes.
“How can you analyze what becomes seamless with yourself?” psychoanalyst and New York Review of Books contributing writer Jamieson Webster asks in the edition’s booklet. In their interview together, Webster and Thurman discuss the work of (in)famous psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, such as his concept of character armor, the collective trauma of the pandemic, and, as Thurman says, “the struggle to escape history.” The edition includes a novel excerpt by Shiv Kotecha—a New York-based poet and critic—that includes talking tattoos and thousands of plastic Garfield phones washing up on the shore of France.
Packaged in a box like those that hold institutional catalogs, the edition includes a hooded sweatshirt by renowned design firm General Working Group, whose projects include collaborations with MoMA, Harvard University, and MOCA Los Angeles. The front of the sweatshirt features a multi-channel silkscreen image of body armor: the original source file of an Iron Man variant, intended for 3D printing in plastic, while the rear and hood of the sweatshirt include silkscreened images and texts extracted from Thurman’s recent projects.
Probing hypermasculinity and plasticized identities, Dream Police_Champion_render.1 expands on the themes and materials that have been fueling Thurman’s artistic practice over the past few years.
This special exhibition at CENTRAL FINE will open with a talk between Thurman and gallery founder Diego Singh on Saturday, July 27th, 2024, at 5 p.m.

Kyle Thurman (b. 1986, Pennsylvania, United States) is an artist, educator, and researcher based in New York City. Recent exhibitions of Thurman’s work include Made Up Men: Danny McDonald & Kyle Thurman at Tureen (Dallas), Accumulator at SOPHIE TAPPEINER (Vienna), and Dream Police at CENTRAL FINE (Miami Beach). In September 2024, Thurman will be curating an exhibition at Sophie Tappeiner in Vienna as part of the annual Curated By festival. In 2023, Thurman curated the multigenerational group exhibition titled Customs Cars Cultures at Unclebrother—an experimental exhibition space, restaurant, and bar founded by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Gavin Brown in rural upstate New York. Thurman’s work is included in the permanent collections of the ICA Miami and the Whitney Museum of American Art among other institutions. An installation of drawings from Thurman’s ongoing Suggested Occupation project was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, curated by Rujeko Hockley and Jane Panetta. Thurman received BA degrees in Film Studies and Visual Arts from Columbia University before studying as a guest student at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf in the class of Christopher Williams. He later completed a MFA degree in painting at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

For media requests, please contact: Rob Goyanes / [email protected]

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Central Fine, 1224-1226 Normandy Drive, Miami Beach, United States