Born Mount Kisco, NY, 1966. Lives and works in New York, NY

Selected Solo Exhibitions: 2003 'Lucky Man', Clementine Gallery, New York 2002 'Michael Wetzel', Judy Ann Goldman Fine Art, Boston

Selected Group Exhibitions: 2003 'Today's Man', John Connelly Presents, New York and Hiromi Yoshi+Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; 'Assume Vivid Astro Focus VII' (collaboration with Eli Sudbrack), Dietch Projects, New York; 'Clementine at Hallwalls', Hallwalls Center for Contemporary Art, Buffalo; 'New Visions, Small Work', Danforth Museum, Framingham 2002 'Where the Boys Are', Clementine Gallery, New York; 'Friends and Family', Lombard-Fried Fine Art, New York 2001 'The Yellow Brick Road', White Columns, New York 2000 'A New Day Dawning', Judy Ann Goldman Fine Art, Boston 1999 'Summer SurReality', Judy Ann Goldman Fine Art, Boston

Selected Bibliography: 2003 "Today's Man," Exhibition Catalogue, Hiromi Yoshi+Gallery, Tokyo; Bollen, Christopher, "Todayâs Man", Time Out New York; Cotter, Holland, "By and About Men and Theyâre Running With It," The New York Times; Smith, Roberta, "Grand Finale of Group Show Fireworks," The New York Times; 'Assume Vivid Astro Focus VII,Ó The New Yorker; Watson, Simon, "Artist Collectives," Issue Magazine; Glueck, Grace, "Lucky Man," The New York Times; Gorden, Amanda, "Painted Preps," The New York Sun 2002 McQuaid, Cate, "Probing the Darkness" The Boston Globe 2000 McQuaid, Cate, "Iconic Figures Emerge,", The Boston Globe

Michael Wetzel

You should never leave the city. Terrible things happen in the woods. Trees conceal and provide cover; they mute cries for help. Ichabod Crane got his head chopped off in Sleepy Hollow (aka Tarrytown), Martha Moxley bought it in verdant Greenwich, and the characters in John Cheever's Shady Hill stories had to keep the gin flowing just to hold the sorrow, fear, and moral rectitude of suburbia at bay. Horrors within, horrors without. If a drunken fall into an empty swimming pool doesn't kill you, then the Headless Horseman just might. The darkest depths are, of course, as close at hand as that bottle of Mount Gay rum Dad squirreled under the front seat of the sedan for those drives up and down the Saw Mill, as close, really, as that maximum security women's prison is to the town of Bedford, New York. Michael Wetzel grew up there, where the old, pretty houses are separated by dense wooded patches and there might be a Colonial-era graveyard just across the road. As a kid he watched horror movies with friends and got scared shitless thinking about potential escapees from that correctional facility or the cemetery.

In Wetzel's paintings the gothic seeps willfully into the pastoral. A tastefully wallpapered hallway stretches infinitely forward, as if to suggest that you'll never make it to your room before whatever is chasing you catches up. Homes stand behind iron gates or stone walls, objects lie smashed and abandoned, and in one work, a paddle tennis court has fallen into neglect now that the game is merely an abandoned bourgeois fad. Always, there is the sense that a trespasser or stalker stands lurking at the edge of the property. But Wetzel leaves everything purposefully vague, like a hair-raising establishing shot in a movie, they manipulate you into delicious anticipation of the coming terror.

Meghan Dailey