Rachel Uffner Gallery is happy to current Artaud’s Shoe from latest Juxtapoz featured artist, Joshua Petker’s second solo exhibition on the gallery. Identified for his spellbinding work, Petker’s anachronistic layering of artwork historic imagery pulls the viewer into evocative narratives that span time and tradition. This exhibition options twelve new work that blur figuration and abstraction, inviting viewers into fantastical dreamworlds the place revelers, animals, and ghostly spectres intermingle.
NYC
The title references the enigmatic dying of French theatre director and avant-garde theorist Antonin Artaud, who was discovered seated on the foot of his mattress holding a shoe. This mysterious anecdote aligns with Artaud’s love for the surreal, disruption of typical theater, and embrace of the absurdity of life and artwork. In naming his present after Artaud, Petker pays homage not solely to the visionary author but additionally to the infinite interpretive potentialities of artmaking and the visceral, transformative engagement that it necessitates.
Petker’s daring, saturated palettes borrow from psychedelic posters of the Nineteen Sixties, whereas his compositions recall the fractured planes of Cubism and the rhythmic dynamism of avant-garde cinema. Fruit Folly exemplifies Petker’s capacity to synthesize various influences into richly imagined tableaux. A single white cockatoo perches on a platter of fruit, taunting two growling greyhounds barely held again by a younger boy wearing Renaissance garb. Within the midground, round patterned flooring recedes abruptly into deep, impenetrable blue. Juxtaposed with the strain of the unfolding scene, two playful, oblivious spectres whirl previous, in pursuit of revels past the sides of the canvas. These ghostly figures, impressed by cartoon imagery from the Nineteen Sixties, usually float curiously via Petker’s imagined scenes, including whimsy to the stately temper of the central characters and talking to the simultaneous humor and gravitas of human expertise.
In Picnic Social gathering, a kaleidoscopic forest scene unfolds, populated by cheery figures – some strong and grounded, others illusory and translucent – who merge right into a riot of vibrant colour and fragmented varieties. 18th century picnic goers share house with caricatured phantom observers, unmooring the works from timelines of visible historical past and confines of actuality. As with a lot of Petker’s work, the portray suggests a rigidity between celebration and transience, between connection and the ephemeral nature of pleasure.
With Artaud’s Shoe, Petker invitations viewers to immerse themselves in a world the place frolicking characters from Northern European style work make merry with satirical apparitions from American animations, dissolving the boundaries of previous and current, right here and there. The acquainted turns into otherworldly and symbols tackle infinite meanings (or no which means in any respect). Directly playful and profound, the exhibition challenges viewers to carouse within the thriller and multiplicity of artmarking – a becoming tribute to the surreal legacy of Antonin Artaud.
