Carter Flachbarth

In Morality Sucks, the artist's first museum exhibition, Carter Flachbarth (b. 1996, Atlanta) assembles recent paintings that cast an ambiguous male figure in myriad narratives, reflecting on anxieties and tensions founded in topical global events. Flachbarth's work is underpinned by prosaic themes embodied in the obscure actions of the artist's protagonist. Originally cast as an autobiographical stand-in, this figure has come to represent broader archetypes of masculinity and their inherent flaws, and is depicted variously as agitated, melancholic, bored, and distracted. Packing his paintings with situational clues, Flachbarth (SCAD B.F.A., painting, 2020) prioritizes action through the amplification of scale, rendering exaggerated bodies — hands and limbs — cinematically, as if through a fisheye lens, bending and twisting the picture plane in irregular positions.