JOE BIEL

Lexicon

20 NOVEMBER - 17 JANUARY 2010

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NETTIE HORN is pleased to present “Lexicon“, a solo exhibition by the Los Angeles-based artist Joe Biel, featuring a series of paintings alongside a large scale drawing.
Through the techniques of drawing and painting, Biel manifests a strong interest in narrative possibilities, by referencing a variety of processes and sources, both literary and historical. Influenced by artists such as Goya, Ingres, Bellini or again Bruegel and Bosch for their engagement in storytelling and the creation of atypical atmospheric environments mixing the observed and the imagined, Biel’s works are however very much rooted in the contemporary world thanks to a very present humour and starkness. The artist states that “both qualities are important in creating work, which speaks insightfully of the present and yet also remains universal and able to communicate to future generations.” This ambivalent and yet characteristic aspect of his work is also present in his large scale drawings with their sense of epic grandeur emphasizing the engagement of the viewer with an insight to the scenes presented. Biel’s work illustrates in this way a particular poetry of collisions with paradoxical aspects revealing a sense of humanity which has become elemental in his work.

The series of monkey paintings partly resulted from an interview with the late writer David Foster Wallace who was questioning the use and effects of emotion and sincerity as strategies in marketing culture. Explaining how the aloof irony generated against this practice is in fact tedious and absurd, the writer went on to voice the view that artists’ mission should lie in revealing the real mechanisms of human nature. Biel responded strongly to these words and began to give the monkeys inhabiting a drawing he was working on their individuality rather than having them belonging to a group.

Referring to the German photographer August Sander, Biel became aware of relationships to the history of portraiture, both in painting and photography and the idea of a collection of certain emotional types representative of our current time.
Evoking a collision between the contemporary civilized world and the more primal animal world, he reveals a sense of vulnerability hidden under the surface of the series, and strangely, though animals are the subject, the real substance of the series is in it becoming a sort of lexicon for human expressions, attitudes and psychological states of being.

Joe Biel lives and works in Los Angeles; he received an MFA in Painting from the University of Michigan in 1990. His work has been exhibited in galleries nationally and internationally at LA Louver Gallery, Roberts and Tilton Gallery, Acuna-Hansen Gallery and Angles Gallery in Los Angeles, Goff + Rosenthal Gallery in New York, Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle, and Galerie Kuckei/Kuckei in Berlin. He has been included in group exhibitions at the Otis College of Art and Design and the Torrance Museum of Art in Los Angeles, the De Young Museum in San Francisco, the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna, CA; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT and Diverseworks in Houston, TX. He was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award in 2003 and in 2008.

© NETTIE HORN