Steven Charles I Don't Know What My Life To Do With
New Paintings May 10 - June 30, 2012
Stux Gallery is pleased to announce Steven Charles' new solo show, "I Don't Know What My Life To Do With". This is Charles' sixth solo show and first show at Stux. Working with a vast repertoire of imaginative materials and painting processes, Charles' canvases offer an electrifying clash of dizzying, explosive patterns, complemented by the presence of staunch control.
Born to an auto-worker father in England, Charles grew up in Texas and became the only artist in his family. He abandoned his original interest in portraiture and landscape paintings after personally experiencing abstraction's ability to generate confusion and mystery. His unplanned, spontaneous, over-saturated and borderline psychedelic paintings are executed with exhausting exactness and discipline. A genuine lover of "clutter", Charles admires minimalists such as Agnes Martin for their restraint.
Severely nearsighted, Charles works inches away from the canvas, and obsessively covers every inch of the fabric with layers of dense patterns of bright, sometimes microscopic enamel dots and playful surfaces. Every edge is precisely calibrated, and the interlacing patterns allude to a possible overarching rhythm. This insistence for order creates a frustrating sense of confinement that makes the spontaneous, bursting energy of his dynamic technique even more dazzling. Objects such as rulers, towels and yarn are occasionally incorporated frenetically without apparent consideration for anything besides their contour and texture. Viewed at a distance, the intricate details recede, and the dizzying breathlessness transforms into an overwhelming sensation of depth and expansiveness.
Charles's maximalist, completely abstract surface questions the notion that abstraction, by common definition, is a process of reduction. Maps, terrains, computer circuits, native American references, urban plans and biological forms all appear as viewers attempt to decipher his pulsating networks. His saturated images become mirrors that viewers can't help but project themselves upon, but any faint recognition of identifiable forms will become immediately overturned by Charles' gift for creating ephemeral, seemingly intentional suggestions. - Lucy Li
Steven Charles is a New York based artist born in England. He earned his BA from the University of North Texas and his MFA from Temple University in Rome. His works have been exhibited in New York at three solo shows at Pierogi and two solo shows at Marlborough, as well as abroad in Canada and Spain. He has been reviewed in publications such as the New York Times, Art in America, BOMB, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Examiner, and The Atlantic Monthly. In 2000, his work earned him both a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Art Fellowship.
Akikazu Iwamoto Works on Paper and Paintings
May 10 - June 30, 2012
Stux Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo show of drawings and paintings by Hiroshima born, Japanese artist Akikazu Iwamoto. Akikazu creates wildly imaginative, candy-colored paintings and drawings that offer confronting, amusing, and sometimes frightening revelations of our inflated inner desires in their most distilled state.
Akikazu was orphaned at a young age, and raised by his grandmother in a house just one kilometer away from the Atomic Bomb Dome. The images and artifacts of the Bomb affected him greatly during his childhood, but the main subject for his artwork is a general deep-seated sense of wickedness that he believes exists in every human psyche.
Akikazu cites Maurice Utrillo, an early 20th century Montmartre painter of emotionally charged Parisian landscapes, as one of his notable inspirations. His works are also influenced by the ethereal colors he witnessed during a trip to Nepal as well as the works of American painter Aaron Johnson and Canadian Marcel Dzama. His visions take place in a comprehensive atmosphere free from the restrictions of reality, where violently mutated creatures, detached body parts and nondescript organic forms are rendered masterfully, contesting an inherent connection between violence and innocence.
In Collector 2, a tiger with five arms and a thousand legs, which represents the artist himself, is dressed in neon yellow dress. Small, smiling monsters float about leisurely, and a growth from the tiger's ear impales a creature that seems to be attempting to hop over the tiger like a pole-vaulter. The characters hover above a receding blue background, and all signs of violence and feral grotesqueness evaporate temporarily beneath Iwamoto's candied colors and balanced composition.
His vast portfolio of drawings further showcases his powerful imagination, and sheds light on his enigmatic compositional processes. Delicately rendered with pastels and colored pencils, these images offer spontaneous, experimental, stand-alone frames that, in their totality, form a panorama of his mental kingdom. They often emanate a sense of mystery that supplements the excitement and energy of his canvases. Their sketchbook-like quality inserts a reporter's notebook-sensibility that makes these jarring, candid scenes from his psychological landscape simultaneously personable and haunting. -Lucy Li
Akikazu Iwamoto is a Japan painter, born and based in Hiroshima. He earned a degree in graphic design from Tohoku College of Arts and Design in Japan, receiving several awards for his design work before turning to painting. His work has been featured prominently in his home country of Japan as well as internationally in the U.S. This is Mr. Iwamoto's second solo show in New York and his first at Stux Gallery.
For further informationplease contact Andrea Schnabl at andrea@stuxgallery.com
