Emerging Contemporary American Painters

1/6-2/5/11

Adela Leibowitz
Jared Latimer
Margaret Murphy
CJ Collins
Josh Peters
Lori Kirkbride

January 5th , 2010—hpgrp Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Emerging Contemporary American Painters, an exhibition of works by artists Adela Leibowitz, CJ Collins, Jared Latimer, Josh Peters, Lori Kirkbride and Margaret Murphy. Although all six artists work in a variety of styles, the show will focus on their paintings, proving that the medium is still relevant cultural world increasingly dominated by digital media.

Adela Leibowitz’s figurative landscapes are inspired by the artist’s memories of visits to ancient Zoroastrian fire temple sites in Persia, where purity rituals were once performed using fire and water. Obscured by fog, the unifying product of the two elements, Leibowitz frames the female figures in her scenes—some who bear animal heads, others who are completely naked—using gaping caves bearing teeth that mimic the shape of the vulva. Amongst these ethereal, spectrally anonymous female figures appear portraits of the American performance artist, rock musician and actress Kembra Pfahler, with whom Leibowitz did a photo shoot with in 2009. She is yet another addition to the cloistered, female-centric Edens that Leibowitz so successfully constructs in her otherworldly compositions.

Jared Latimer’s “Street View” series is inspired by his interest in exploring his own landscape using digital mapping technologies such as Google Street View. From the comfort of his own home, he virtually roams through the neighborhoods around him, searching for anomalies in the digitally replayed world. In Freyer House (2010), Latimer uses the digitally distorted image of the house of a fellow artist to break the line between reality and the world viewed through the lens of a camera. In Pigeon Hollow (2010), he paints a deer carcass lying on the side of a road divided by a yellow line, in an attempt to subvert the traditional, idyllic landscapes that are being painted by other artists in his neighborhood. Attracted both to the carrion and the line of the road which recalls Barnett Newman’s paintings of the sublime, Latimer combines references to figurative painting and high-modernism to create a new visual vocabulary for the digital age.

Margaret Murphy’s paintings, Couple #1, #2, #3 (2010) and Broken #1 (2010), feature broken porcelain figurines isolated on flat turquoise backgrounds. Although the figurines are throwbacks to a distant past (hey are clothed in Colonial American attire), they exist very much in the present, in a unique space frozen in the flow of history. In their isolation, they attempt to reconcile what has been fragmented—their own bodies from their original context, their missing parts—signalling the ability of objects, and perhaps the self, to persevere as time moves inexorably forward.

The color block paintings of CJ Collins, Islands of Thought (2010) and The Moon Never Gave Me Much Trouble (2010), buzz with the energy of lines converging and forming shapes by their own volition. Very much subjective, based on the artist’s internal responses to natural phenomena that she records in sketches and drawings, the paintings beckon for the viewer to ascribe their own emotional readings onto the expressionistic, vaguely figurative scenes.

Josh Peters work focuses on psychologically charged groupings of figures that mainly depict men and women living away from civilized society. His most recent paintings are inspired by William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, whose two main characters—one who ruled by fear, the other by reason—struck him as being heavily parallel to the political figures in contemporary society. In Peters work, an impending sense of violence or spiritual awakening lurks just underneath the surface of the paint.

Lori Kirkbride’s heavily patterned works—Daisy (2010), Betty (2010) and Lily (2010)—are full of a great deal of joy, inspired both by the artist’s mood while creating them, and by the spectators reaction upon viewing them. Consisting mostly of painted daisies, which crowd and clump together on the canvas, the compositions have a kinetic energy. They are informed by Kirkbride’s continued fascination with the neon colors of her childhood, used in such objects as My Little Pony® and Barbie®, as well as the patterns of the textiles on her grandmother’s sundresses and furniture. By employing elements of play and experimentation, Kirkbride’s works emit a sense of real happiness that is rare to chance upon in every day life.