Empty City by Rick Prol

An empty train track suspended against a backdrop of city buildings late at night. This scene is devoid of any human presence or vehicles... but something lurks in their absence.
This cat is a common motif in Rick Prol"s work, and transports the viewer to a bygone era in New York City, when elevated tracks still wound through the heart of downtown. Alternatively, it might conjure a contemporary atmosphere, akin to the sensation you experience while traversing the Williamsburg Bridge on the JMZ line, gazing into Brooklyn and back at the cityscape across the river.

[Rick Prol]
Rick Prol was born and raised in New York City where he currently lives and works. He attended Cooper Union College in 1980 and began showing his work publicly in 1982, during the then burgeoning East Village art scene. As art artic Eleanor Heartney writes, The East Village art scene of the 80`s thrived on the romance of slumming in an era of widespread economic prosperity. Rick Prol was an icon of that era, known for his cartoonish tableaux of mayhem, murder and suicide set in a rat-infested world somewhere east of First Avenue (Art in America, 1993)

Prol`s work exemplified and helped define with anarchical impudence the more dangerous and harrowing aspects of urban reality with images both horrific and absurd, but always with a touch of humor. Rick Prol had two solo exhibitions at Leeahn Gallery in Seoul and Deagu, Korea in 2021. He recently held a solo show  Rick Prol: Empty City in James Fuentes Gallery.

http://instagram.com/rickprol