Dennis Hollingsworth

Bart Exposito, Friday at Tom Solomon Gallery

Bart Exposito will be opening his show at Tom Solomon Gallery this Friday. From the gallery's press release:

Thomas Solomon Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new works on paper by Los Angeles artist BART EXPOSITO. This is the artist?s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The show will open at Thomas Solomon Gallery with a reception for the artist on Friday January 21st, 6 ? 8 PM at 427 Bernard Street, Chinatown, Los Angeles.

Considered one of the most well regarded painters of his generation, Exposito has developed and maintained a unique voice in the milieu of abstraction. For more than a decade he has produced beautiful, subtle, intelligent works that evoke design and architecture, as well as nod to the hard-edged abstraction of his predecessors. After years of painting and drawing on parallel trajectories, in 2009/10 the artist turned his attention to paper as a distinct medium, elevated from its often subordinate position within the art hierarchy that privileges ephemera and concept within the contemporary dialogue. "Paper Primitives" as an exhibition title implies that drawings are preparatory, ?primitive? paintings; but also alludes to characteristics of history and language, unaffected, original, not derivative of another form. Rather than subject his practice to a bifurcation between ?study? and final work, Exposito has developed a technique and mastery of material that produces works on any scale, on canvas or paper, that share the same DNA. Using both wet and dry media in harmonious partnership and to wonderful formal effect, painting is revealed as drawing and drawing is revealed as painting, and the traditional lines between them begin to dissolve. Yet the immediacy and purity of the medium, however, signify that drawing is, as the exhibition title proposes, the form from which all others have been derived. The exhibition will include a collection of new works (all 2010/11), mostly on paper, and for the first time preparatory studies, inviting the viewer for the first time into his practice. The installation will carry the viewer from pencil sketches ? the most immediate and perhaps most pure works an artist can create ? to mature, exquisitely rendered images in acrylic and pastel on paper and canvas. Themes of landscape, architecture and figuration will be visible throughout, and formal and conceptual connections will be made across works in all media.

Bart Exposito was born in Amarillo, Texas. 
He received his BFA from the University of Texas, Austin (1998) and MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA (2000). He has exhibited nationally in galleries and museums including the Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, California; University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles; Black Dragon Society, Los Angeles; Creative Artists Agency, Los Angeles; Claremont Graduate University; Galerie Grimm/Rosenfeld, M?nich, Germany; and Galerie f?r Gegenwartskunst, Bremen, Germany. In 2009, Exposito was included in the exhibition Abstract America at the Saatchi Gallery, London (catalogue). Public collections include Bank of America, Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Ohio and Saatchi Gallery, London. Bart Exposito lives and works in Los Angeles.