Those who have enjoyed the four-part serialization by local writer Nancy Hightower "The Four Horsemen" may be wondering what it could possibly mean. We asked Nancy to ply her exceptional creative writing skills to an exhibition that we've been devising over the last eight months that brings two searingly awesome national artists together with two local talents that we've had our eyes on for a while now. The apocalyptic theme seems to resonate within all of the artists work, at least we felt it to be a useful and timely model to add cohesion for the start of the year 2012. But what really distinguishes the group more than anything is the detailed, personal approach to drawing and works on paper that is elevated above the norm. We hope that you will find the same level of engagement and interest in the works of Drew Englander, Donald Fodness, Paul Nudd and Larry Bob Phillips as we do, and will come see an exhibition unlike any other in the gallery history.
Drew Englander and Donald Fodness represent two of Denver's premier up-and-coming artists, both distinguishing themselves through their graphic abilities and distinct voices within Denver's scene in recent years. Englander is a recent fine-arts graduate of the Rocky Mountain School of Art and Design and no stranger to the contemporary exhibition field. His first involvement with Plus Gallery was inclusion in the 2008 three-person exhibition "Trickle Down," the final intern-curated show to be hosted at Object + Thought and certainly the most provocative. Englander presented a more expansive view of his work at Denver's Illiterate Gallery in 2010, one that started to render a signature feel to his output, which consisted of almost microscopically detailed renderings of explosions (or "Growths" as the artist named them) as well as body parts and figures merging into one another. Englander has been involved in multiple performance works with his RMCAD compatriots and in 2011 started to develop national recognition for his music entity "Real Magic."
Donald Fodness, the lead inspiration for "Apocalypse? HOW!" has certainly achieved a level of distinction that is rare amongst emerging artists not only in Denver but anywhere in the county. Three of his last four exhibitions since 2010 were invitations from the areas most prestigious curators, including his major installation piece for last year's groundbreaking "Blink!" new media exhibition at the Denver Art Museum. Fodness was fresh from receiving his MFA in painting from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and showing all the brashness of youth with works that defied painting per-se and ranged more into the extraordinary, merging painting, installation, video, and just about everything along with the kitchen sink. But at the heart of his output are works on paper that read like high-school journals, featuring a largely indescribable random quotient. According to Fodness, "I use seemingly benign, somewhat enticing, imagery to draw my audience into a layered and unsettling world of complexities. Among the kitsch and banal I cram the gross, grotesque, obnoxious, and weird." That, along with a haze of spray paint, maybe just to affirm that it's use needn't be relegated to the sides of buildings.
Completing the quartet of Horseman are two of the more premier emerging artists on the national level, Albuquerque's Larry Bob Phillips and Chicago's Paul Nudd. With drawing as his primary medium for the last ten years, Phillips utilizes a mature cartoon-based language that responds to psychedelic impulses to "create a form that has plasticity and transformation as its explicit focus, allowing the viewer to experience the paranoid formalism of the image where nothing is anything, but everything is something." The result is a densely wrought explosion on paper and panel rendered in dark-black ink that has a steady focus positioning humanity at its most base instincts in natural settings that are no-doubt influenced by his New Mexico surroundings. Like many artists of today, Phillips has successfully expanded his context beyond the traditional "work on paper", having realized major installations and full-wall drawings that brazenly expound the surreal impact of his work. The psycho-sexual nature of his latest drawings for "Apocalypse? HOW!" affirm his desire to mimic the "violent pregnancy within modern painting" that French painters like Bonnard, Braque and Van Gogh instilled at the turn of the last century.
In less than ten years, Chicago artist Paul Nudd has truly pushed the envelope of the subversive in contemporary art, with a wide-ranging output that includes sculpture, video and works on paper of all dimensions and mediums. What pulls them together is their extremely grotesque nature that is densely wrought and successfully engages a wide-variety of colors and textures that have been aptly referred to as "icky." With solo exhibition titles such "Vomitromiton" and "Pus Lust," one might wonder what the visual appeal might be in the artists work, but there is no doubting the high artistic level that Nudd achieves in making the icky appealing. His 9' tall "Brainiac Cack" will stand perhaps as the ringleader of the apocalyptic vision put forth by the rest of the artists in the exhibition.
"Apocalypse? HOW!" will open with "Rapture," a public reception/celebration on Friday, January 27th starting at 6pm. We'll be pouring Great Divide "Hades" beer that night in celebration. Expect the unexpected!
The Ooey Gooey Aesthetics of Subversive Drawer Paul Nudd
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPi8oXgr6BM
Donald Fodness in Blink!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xrc8QZJQciY
Larry Bob Phillips
http://larrybobphillips.com
