Blum & Poe

Chriss Vasell

02 Jul - 22 Aug 2009

© Chris Vasell
To The People That Know This Is Nowhere (Gallery 1)
B Flat Major, 2009
Acrylic on canvas
90 x 76 inches
CHRIS VASELL

July 2 - August 22, 2009
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 2, 6 – 8 pm

Blum & Poe is pleased to announce our third solo exhibition of work by Chris Vasell. Very much invested in the alchemical and supernatural experience of the act and viewing of painting, Chris Vasell is following multiple, circuitous paths through psychedelia, figuration, abstraction, and painting’s own history.
To The People of Los Angeles is a trio of works in which Vasell employs grand scale and low threshold radiance. Emanating interwoven concentric circles are overlaid with a systematic grid of collaged, raw canvas squares. Here canvas doubles as ground and medium to construct a topographical map both conceptually and literally of surface. In To The People of Alhambra, Vasell utilizes grid distortion and subtle grayscale shifts. This manipulation of surface further complicates the work, sometimes in a very visceral way.
Less structured and directed, paintings in the series To The People That Know This Is Nowhere present a more intuitive, improvisational and imploded approach. Un-phased by, yet ever-mindful of the heavily mined territory he’s negotiating, the artist continually expands his personal capacity for discovery through painting. These works, direct and deft in execution and accurate in self-expression, coalesce the conjurer and the personal.
Vasell has participated in a number of group and solo exhibitions both nationally and internationally, including this year's Something Wicked this Way Comes at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Madison, WI; in 2007, Post Rose: Artists in and Out of the Hazard Park Complex at Galerie Christian Nagel in Berlin, Germany curated by Sterling Ruby, and in 2006 the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY and Having New Eyes at the Aspen Art Museum in Aspen, Colorado. His work is included in the collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Works are promised to the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Chris Vasell lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Alhambra, CA.
 

Tags: Sterling Ruby, Chris Vasell