This exhibition explores the multi-generational influence and shared affinities of New York- based painters Peter Saul, Erik Parker and Jamian Juliano-Villani.
Saul’s color-drenched grotesques emerged out of the same heady stew that produced the underground comix revolution, and this imagery and inclination has metastasized in the work of Parker, his former student. Parker’s influence, in turn, has been refracted in his former studio assistant Juliano-Villani continuing what now amounts to a burgeoning mini-tradition in style, mood and provocative subject matter.
Art-historical referents meet lurid pop sources and are rendered in a juiced up palette that challenges even our advertising-addled brains. Virtuoso painting skills wrestle with the lewd and crude, but also with the transcendent and truly weird American subconscious. In defiance of the pervasiveness of oblique abstraction across each of the artists’ generations, these works, above all, are freighted with content, both direct and associative.
Jamian Juliano-Villani (b. 1987)
Jamian Juliano-Villani was born in Newark, New Jersey and received her BFA from Rutgers University in 2011. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Selected exhibitions include Me, Myself and Jah, Rawson Projects, Brooklyn, NY (2013); Time Machine, Galerie Sho Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan (2013); Petrella’s Imports at Suzanne Geiss Company, Suzanne Geiss Company, New York, NY (2013); Style Points and Substance Pangs, Tiger Stikes Asteroid, Philadelphia, PA (2013); Deep Cuts, curated by David Humphrey and Wendy White. Anna Kustera Gallery, New York, NY (2013); and Division 169, curated by Justin Adian and Wendy White. Rawson Projects, Brooklyn, NY (2012).
Erik Parker (b. 1968)
Erik Parker was born in Stuttgart, Germany, and studied at the University of Texas, Austin with Peter Saul before receiving his master of fine arts from Purchase College of the State University of New York. He was included in the first “Greater New York” show at P.S.1 in 2000 and has had recent solo exhibitions at Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York, NY; The Cornerhouse Gallery in Manchester, England; De Appel in Amsterdam; the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, TX; Colette in Paris; Honor Fraser in Los Angeles; and Galleri Faurschou in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Peter Saul (b. 1934)
Peter Saul was born in San Francisco, California, and studied at the California School of Fine Arts from 1950 to 1952 and at Washington University in St. Louis from 1952 to 1956. Peter Saul lives between New York City, and Germantown, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Paintings from the 60s and 70s, Mary Boone Gallery, New York, NY (2013); Neptune and the Octopus Painter, VeneKlasen Werner, Berlin, Germany (2013); and Peter Saul/Jim Shaw: Drawings, Mary Boone Gallery, New York, NY (2013). Recent notable group exhibitions include Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’: An Homage, Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, New York, NY (2013); Sinister Pop, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2012); Pretty on the Inside, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY (2011); and Ordinary Madness, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (2010).
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