Philip Geiger's Intimate Paintings at Tibor deNagy Gallery Explore Domestic Ideals

Philip Geiger's exhibition at Tibor deNagy Gallery in New York City ran from October 4 to November 10, 2007, featuring paintings that depict spare domestic interiors and attractive young people. The artist, a Yale graduate and southerner, creates works characterized by intuitive, sensual approaches and pearly light revealed through rich, spontaneous surfaces. His painting "A Different Shirt" from 2006 shows a young woman gazing into empty rooms beyond a tabletop display, with a forthright richness in color and pigment. Geiger describes his process as intuitive, letting intensity carry the painting, as noted in an essay for the 2005 show "Human Measures" at the University of Indiana. He is often compared to Fairfield Porter, though Geiger avoids Porter's inclusion of modern celebrity culture and explicit personal details, instead focusing on discreet domesticity. The repeated setting in his work since the early 1990s is his own home, a turn-of-the-20th-century dining room and parlor, where casually elegant twenty-somethings engage in intimate interactions, often with their backs to the viewer. Titles like "Locked House" (2007) and "Favorite Words" (2006) hint at drama, but Geiger maintains he does not intend narrative, emphasizing moments found rather than set up. The models in his paintings are paid, and his work reflects a concept of ideal beauty, positioning him as a contemporary intimist in the tradition of Vermeer, Corot, Vuillard, and Porter.