Dike Blair
18 Jan - 01 Mar 2014
DIKE BLAIR
18 January – 1 March 2014
The relationship between my paintings and sculpture (or other installation-type work) has intrigued me for a couple decades. The paintings are fairly traditional and almost always personal while the sculptures are more formal, or engage less traditional forms. One thing that seems to have remained constant in all my work is the subject of light, and how to form paint to apprehend light
Dike Blair
We are very happy to present Dike Blair’s first solo exhibition in Germany. The American artist will show two sculptures and a selection of paintings on paper.
Since landing in New York in the mid-1970s, Dike Blair charted a singular path, early on making work that ranged from things like photo and paint contructions on glass, to installations, like one inspired by Disney World’s Epcot Center. In the mid-1980s he began to paint modestly scaled, representational gouaches on paper, and he has continued that practice ever since.
Over the years those paintings have focused on a succession of subjects related to traditional genre painting; landscapes (travel scenes), still lifes, and portraiture. These photo-based gouaches capture glimpses of a roving eye that seeks out and captures the split second, dead-pan phenomenon of the observed world. They bring attention to the banal and transitory details of everyday life, from cigarettes in ashtrays to footprints in snow. They feel at once very personal, even diaristic, but also filtered and mediated. Blair also often presents thematic pairings, such as windows and flowers, or parkings lots and women’s eyes.
About 20 years ago, Blair’s installation work distilled into assemblages, which he calls sculptures, made of carpet, light fixtures, photographs and bench-like elements. Then, a decade later, those sculptures gave way to an ongoing series of work that incorporate painted wooden shipping crates. In these hybrid sculptures, the shipping crate „unpacks“ and includes the other elements of the sculpture: always, one or more framed gouache paintings, sometimes things like carpet or light fixtures. These sculptures may evoke thoughts about light, both actual and implied, the liminal, and more quotidian notions about storage, furniture and the human body.
From the late 1980’s to the present, Blair has exhibited the representational paintings alongside the more abstract works, and the interplay between these diverse modes of artmaking is of continuous interest to him.
Though the relationship between the media was not immediately obvious – the sculptures bring together the languages of abstraction, architecture and the ready-made, while the paintings are highly realist – it did immediately strike this viewer as intuitively ‘right’.*
*Naomi Fry in frieze
Dike Blair (*1952) grew up in Western Pennsylvania, USA. He earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1977, and also attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Blair’s work has been shown in many venues, including group exhibitions such as, “Let’s Entertain,” Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2000); “Elysian Fields,” Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2000); The “Whitney Biennial,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2004), “Vanishing Point,” Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2005); and “Now and Again,” Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC (2009). Blair received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009 and a Rome Prize in 2010. He also writes and in 2007, Whitewalls published Again, a book of collected interviews and essays. He is a Senior Critic at the Rhode Island School of Design.
18 January – 1 March 2014
The relationship between my paintings and sculpture (or other installation-type work) has intrigued me for a couple decades. The paintings are fairly traditional and almost always personal while the sculptures are more formal, or engage less traditional forms. One thing that seems to have remained constant in all my work is the subject of light, and how to form paint to apprehend light
Dike Blair
We are very happy to present Dike Blair’s first solo exhibition in Germany. The American artist will show two sculptures and a selection of paintings on paper.
Since landing in New York in the mid-1970s, Dike Blair charted a singular path, early on making work that ranged from things like photo and paint contructions on glass, to installations, like one inspired by Disney World’s Epcot Center. In the mid-1980s he began to paint modestly scaled, representational gouaches on paper, and he has continued that practice ever since.
Over the years those paintings have focused on a succession of subjects related to traditional genre painting; landscapes (travel scenes), still lifes, and portraiture. These photo-based gouaches capture glimpses of a roving eye that seeks out and captures the split second, dead-pan phenomenon of the observed world. They bring attention to the banal and transitory details of everyday life, from cigarettes in ashtrays to footprints in snow. They feel at once very personal, even diaristic, but also filtered and mediated. Blair also often presents thematic pairings, such as windows and flowers, or parkings lots and women’s eyes.
About 20 years ago, Blair’s installation work distilled into assemblages, which he calls sculptures, made of carpet, light fixtures, photographs and bench-like elements. Then, a decade later, those sculptures gave way to an ongoing series of work that incorporate painted wooden shipping crates. In these hybrid sculptures, the shipping crate „unpacks“ and includes the other elements of the sculpture: always, one or more framed gouache paintings, sometimes things like carpet or light fixtures. These sculptures may evoke thoughts about light, both actual and implied, the liminal, and more quotidian notions about storage, furniture and the human body.
From the late 1980’s to the present, Blair has exhibited the representational paintings alongside the more abstract works, and the interplay between these diverse modes of artmaking is of continuous interest to him.
Though the relationship between the media was not immediately obvious – the sculptures bring together the languages of abstraction, architecture and the ready-made, while the paintings are highly realist – it did immediately strike this viewer as intuitively ‘right’.*
*Naomi Fry in frieze
Dike Blair (*1952) grew up in Western Pennsylvania, USA. He earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1977, and also attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Blair’s work has been shown in many venues, including group exhibitions such as, “Let’s Entertain,” Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2000); “Elysian Fields,” Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2000); The “Whitney Biennial,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2004), “Vanishing Point,” Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2005); and “Now and Again,” Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC (2009). Blair received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009 and a Rome Prize in 2010. He also writes and in 2007, Whitewalls published Again, a book of collected interviews and essays. He is a Senior Critic at the Rhode Island School of Design.