Past Exhibition
Edith Beaucage
Alexander Kroll
Matt Lifson
Lily Simonson
"The art that dare not speak its name."
July 7 - August 1, 2010
Reception for the artists: Saturday July 10, 5 – 8 p.m.
CB1 Gallery proudly presented the work of four emerging LA-based painters—Edith Beaucage, Alexander Kroll, Matt Lifson and Lily Simonson—in an exhibition entitled, “The art that dare not speak its name.” In her February 10, 2010 article in The New York Times, art critic Roberta Smith, discussing current trends in the “art world” says, “What’s missing is art that seems made by one person out of intense personal necessity, often by hand. A lot but not all of this kind of work is painting, which seems to be becoming the art medium that dare not speak its name..." These four artists proudly speak the name of painting. The exhibition opened on July 7, 2010 and closed on August 1, 2010.
Character and abstraction are linked on the canvases of Edith Beaucage in a way requiring no other narrative outside of these two elements. Reflecting emotions with paint, backgrounds often disappear and, in contrast to the characters, the “abstractions” play a variation of roles in the images, oftentimes behaving as portraits.
Alexander Kroll’s modestly scaled abstract paintings are simultaneously structural and intuitive. The layers of painterly information both highlight and obscure previous ideations leaving the viewer an artwork that is at once a highly specific painted object and a record of an activity, a subjective engagement with painterly space.
Exploring narrative through juxtaposition and psychological metaphor, Matt Lifson is interested in the cinematic element of painting, where there are paused moments that linger somewhere between clarity and ambiguity. Charged with sexuality and humor, his paintings draw inspiration from youth subculture, ritual and exploration.
Lily Simonson’s paintings of invertebrates seek to evoke transcendent states of being in which the boundaries between the self and the external world are breached and transgressed. Simultaneously anthropomorphizing the creatures and highlighting their otherworldly ambiguities, her paintings represent liminality, transformation, and human experiences of mystical and erotic ecstasy.
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