Paul Loughney

Paul Loughney
Brooklyn, New York, USA

STATEMENT

I create highly layered and complex collage works that combine landscapes and text to explore the ways images and language shape and sometimes control human behavior. I’m interested in systems like propaganda, advertising, and self-help culture—places where slogans, commands, and repeated phrases quietly influence how we think and see ourselves.

Landscape and portrait often serve as my starting points. They act as visual anchors that allow me to pursue recurring themes throughout the work: psychological and psychedelic undertones, erotic tension, and symbols of transformation that draw from both spiritual and esoteric traditions. I’m interested in identity as something unstable and layered, more like a series of shifting masks than a fixed state. Simultaneous narratives are a desired result. I explore that identity-based imagery in my Spirit Portrait series.

In my “Psychic Wilderness” series, I work with a range of landscape imagery that, when blended with text, becomes a kind of internal or psychic terrain. These works reflect the mental space where we absorb, process, and internalize the constant flood of images and language we encounter every day. Slogans emerge as quiet harbingers. The results are dense and vibrant collages. My compositions can lean towards maximalist, and I like to make work that rewards slow looking.

All of my work is sourced from contemporary magazines and made entirely by hand. The collages are mounted on wood panel and presented like paintings, emphasizing both their physical presence and the labor-intensive nature of the process.

BIO

Paul Loughney received his MFA degree in 2006 from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

He has participated in several solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Some include Lesley Heller Gallery, New York, New York; Vorderzimmer, Brooklyn, New York; Jane’s Room, New York, New York; The Betsy Hotel, Miami, Florida; Satchel Projects, New York; Frosch and Portmann, New York, New York; La Fratrinidad, Mexico City, Mexico; Pantheon, Mexico City, Mexico; Peter Freeman, Inc., New York, New York; Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, California; Kunsthochschule für Medien, Cologne, Germany; Subspace Gallery, Berlin, Germany.

His work is in the permanent collection of Nobel Collection in Zurich; Purdue University, Indiana; Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum, New York Public Library, New York; and the Brodsky Center at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.

ARTIST CONTACT

[click to email]
www.paulloughney.com

IMAGES