JASON FOX – BEWARE OF DARKNESS
2018-03-19Jason Fox’s first solo show was held at Feature in New York in the early nineties, just after MoMA’s High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture (the first major exhibition to address “the relationship between modern art and popular and commercial culture.”)and only two years before Mike Kelley organized The Uncanny at the Gemeentemuseum, Arnhem. Fox’s work itself acts as a link between these events, and they in turn allow us to chronologically situate his acts of borrowing from both art history and from record sleeves of the seventies. Although considered as common practice today, this kind of artistic approach was not so widespread at the time.
In a recent interview with artist Joe Bradley, Fox explicits his position: “The early nineties was another death-of-painting period and to be making expressive paintings that had nothing to do with appropriation was going against the tide. […] From the start I was interested in a kind of cyborg/extreme figuration. For me Guston was the big shadow to get out from under. He did what I wanted to do. He’s this giant shadow, and to get out from under it my strategy was to go extreme. I was listening to Howard Stern, watching early Cronenberg movies, looking at S. Clay Wilson and Crumb. I wanted to blow the figure up and rebuild it in a Frankenstein-ish way. Art history and comics were the body parts.”
Opposite – George with Dragon, 2017
Exhibition runs through to April 7th, 2018
Almine Rech Gallery
20 rue de l’Abbaye
B-1050 Brussels
Belgium
