Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present our second solo show with RICHARD HULL. His new series of paintings recombines the imagery of horses’ tails and the Klein bottle from recent works into ecstatic abstract portraits resembling exploding flowers. The show opens on Friday, April 20, 2012 with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm and will run through May 16th, 2012. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm and by appointment.
Since 2005, in paintings, drawings and prints, Richard Hull has been re-working a kidney-shaped form derived from a horse’s tail. In his last show at Western Exhibitions in 2010 the tail/kidney was doubled, influenced by the concept of a Klein bottle, a non-orientable surface with no identifiable "inner" and "outer" sides. This allowed Hull to explore spatial relationships, both metaphorically and formally, between the geometric dualities of empty and full spaces. In these new paintings, he doubles and triples and quadruples the tail/kidney shapes; now resembling looping flower petal forms, using them as building blocks for a sort of portrait. The bulbous loops are accentuated by minute, repetitive, often concentric actions within the large masses.
Humid, earthy colors dominate, reinforcing the corporeal sensibility in the head-like images. Ruby red grapefruit swim with deep crimsons, dancing with fecund browns. Subtle bits of impasto clash with oily, smudgy swooshes that look almost like highly refined finger-painting. This particularly delicious effect is achieved by transparent oil paint wobbly traversing over beeswax, a sophisticated technique that gives the appearance of sweaty immediacy. His “heads” rest on angular props, something akin to furniture.
Hull views the images as stolen portraits, each with different personalities. The imagery is possibly borrowed from Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” masterpiece from the 1600’s. A reproduction of the famous Spanish painting sits on a stack of magazines in his studio and the artist admits that it may have subconsciously affected his color choices; the flowery bonnets and elaborate ruffles in the clothing may have found their way into the exuberant forms in Hull’s canvases. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the Italian painter from the 1500s is another unmistakable influence on Hull’s current practice, as his portrait heads were composed by piling images of fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish and books.
Richard Hull’s paintings, drawings and prints are in the collections of several museums including The Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Smithsonian Museum, Washington, D.C.; Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and The Smart Museum, Chicago. He has exhibited his work at The Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, OH; Portland Art Museum, OR; The Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH; Herron Gallery of Art, Indianapolis, IN; Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Evanston IL; and The Painting Center, New York, NY. He joined the legendary Phyllis Kind Gallery before graduating from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago in 1979 and had numerous shows in both her New York City and Chicago locations. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at Wake Forest University, a mini-survey at the Rockford Art Museum, and the group show, “Somebody Else’s Dream” curated by John McKinnon at the Hyde Park Art Center. Hull recently interviewed legendary Chicago painters Jim Nutt and Gladys Nillson for BOMB Magazine and has an upcoming collaboration with jazz/improvised music master Ken Vandermark, a 1999 MacArthur Fellow, at the DePaul Museum of Art. Hull lives and works in Chicago.
April 20 to May 19, 2012
In Gallery 2 LILLI CARRÉ Moving Holds
In Gallery 2, we are thrilled to present “Moving Holds”, our first solo show with LILLI CARRÉ. A "moving hold" is an animation technique that involves cycling several drawings of a stationary character, giving the drawn lines a sense of vibration and energy. This allows the image to have a sense of movement while it is suspended in space in a holding pattern, making it feel alive while it is still. For the show Carré has created three different sets of work that all incorporate moving holds, as an idea, a technique, or both. The show opens on Friday, April 20, 2012 with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm and will run through May 19th, 2012. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm and by appointment.
Lilli Carré is attracted to the collision of tragedy and humor. Working primarily in the mediums of comics and animation, Carré often depicts tragic moments within forms mainly known for their lightheartedness, allowing for a more disarming resonance. By isolating and giving character to ignored objects and daily moments, or weaving them into a narrative structure, Carré depicts the absurdity, despair and humor that these small pieces of everyday life can illuminate. The works in this show all focus on the human body in space being broken.
“Everything Must Go” is an animated loop made from roughly 500 paintings, based frame-by-frame on found footage of a windsock man blowing in the wind on top of a shuttered business. The graphic, exaggerated human form dances awkwardly in space, characterized by both the goofy expression of extreme joy and the desperation of another failed business, an alternately ecstatic and beaten-down figure. The figure is forever flapping in a constant state of catharsis or nervous breakdown, a flailing body that no longer has a purpose. The animation is a laborious tribute to this body in the wind, itself a ridiculous monument to failure.
For “In Suspense”, a hand-drawn animated loop of a human triangle being alternately composed and let loose, Carré rotoscoped the first half of a cycle from an early Lumiere Brother film snippet. The act of tracing and retracing the bodies allowed the forms to become more distinctly geometric and abstract. The figures rebuild themselves into an acrobatic pose of carefully balanced human towers, and then break down into wandering basic shapes, and the loop begins again, the towers re-form, break down and repeat, again and again.
Carré’s new series of large ink wash drawings, “The Meteorites”, depict balled masses of what resembles calcified remains, space junk clusters or what may be found at the bottom of a purse or well, collected and re-solidified into a new mass. Each meteorite represents the decay and reformation of a person and all their things. Some parts of the body are geometrically abstracted and broken down, while other more trivial objects like high heels, coins and old house plants remain perfectly intact. Carré thinks of theses masses as meteorites, dead and lifeless yet flying fast through space with eventual impact.
Lilli Carré is an interdisciplinary artist currently living in Chicago, and primarily works in the forms of experimental animation, film, and comics. Her animated films have been shown in festivals throughout the US and abroad, including the Sundance Film Festival, and she is the co-founder of the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation. Her books of comics are The Lagoon, Nine Ways to Disappear, Tales of Woodsman Pete, and the forthcoming collection Heads or Tails. Her work has appeared in The Believer Magazine, the New Yorker, The New York Times, Best American Comics and Best American Nonrequired Reading. This summer she will be working on a new collaborative animated piece as a resident at Yaddo.
