Lisa Boyle Gallery is pleased to present the gallery's first solo exhibition of work by Chicago artist Steven Husby. The five paintings on view are from a recent series in which the artist examines the pictorial elements and the formal object hood of the paintings struggling for supremacy against one another.
In this body of work, Husby continues a relationship with the classic project of modernist (particular avante-gardist) painting, act of reconciling the constraints of the painting's edge with the imagery that is inevitably influenced by it.
While it might be easiest to classify the work as Op-Art inspired in its use of systemic patterning structures, it would be more accurate to relate it with the work of artists like Frank Stella, and the concern with literal formalism.
While the artist sites his main concern as manipulating, and confusing this delineation between painting and object, it isn't without reverence for the very painterly activity of applying the actual pigment. Instead of simply laying out the color in preconceived arrangements in order to get the point across, Husby instead chooses to painstakingly hand paint the forms, striving for utter perfection in his execution. The effort adds another layer to the meaning of the works, as the viewer is forced to double up on their first impressions of the paintings as design. At first approach, it is very difficult to imagine that such strict forms and gradations of color can be achieved by hand and when they reveal themselves to be so, they require a wholesale reconsideration by the viewer.
Husby is a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has had solo exhibitions at Fraction Workspace in Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (12 x 12 Series) and was the subject of an Artforum's Critics Pick review for his last show of paintings.
Sarah Anne Lobb, a painter living in Philadelphia, also relies on questions of formalism in her small paintings, albeit with a less rigorous plan for each work. More so that in Husby's work, the final effort emerges out of the relationship of the forms and color as it is happaning on the canvas. She responds to particular questions in the work, though with an intuitive practice supported by intellectual curiosity.
Lobb has exhibited her work in New York at White Cube and at the NADA and Armory Show Art fairs.
