PAUL HEYER

Blue Boy

OPENING RECEPTION

Saturday, June 1, 2019, 7-10pm

June 1 – July 13, 2019  
 

Night Gallery is proud to present Blue Boy, a solo exhibition of new work by the Chicago-based artist Paul Heyer. This is Heyer’s fourth solo exhibition at Night Gallery.

This new body of work conjures a futuristic goth fantasy, both playful and spiritual. Skeletons beckon, trees grow luminous blue apples, and strangers’ hands join to form butterfly shapes. Some of the paintings are interrupted by large floating circles, holes in the depicted reality.

Sensually seductive, these works question our divorce from each other and the natural world in this increasingly algorithm-driven time.  We are living in transitory moment when humans will either start to perish or float into the realm of demi-gods (or both).  Heyer’s recent paintings consciously perch on that edge, both recalling the history of culture that makes us human and positing a future of looking back at our planet.

Named after Thomas Gainsborough’s famous painting “Blue Boy” (a few miles away at the Huntington Museum), this show consciously embraces Gainsborough’s melodramatic portrayal of a subject on the verge of transformation.  Just as the boy in Gainsborough’s painting will soon become an adult with responsibilities, so must we accept the fate that we have been shaping.  And like the shape-shifting subjects of the paintings, the show’s title also floats around from reference to reference, be it the Joni Mitchell song, the brand of poppers, or Picasso’s blue period.  There is even a hustler bar in Berlin called Blue Boy.
 
This work continues Heyer’s investigation into painting’s ability to depict the invisible.  Referencing artists from Durer to Polke to Kusama, Heyer slams together the intimate and the epic, Disney and dystopia, spiritual and trash. Here, his paintings suggest, we can find a space of transcendence—it is somewhere beyond absurdity, mortality, and the mythologies from which societies are constructed. Heyer’s Blue Boy is a mischievous but earnest ode to the transformative power of the imagination and the instant of becoming.

Paul Heyer (b. 1982, Chicago) received his MFA from Columbia University in 2009. He has had four solo exhibitions as Night Gallery, and his work has been shown at Chapter NY, New York; Andrea Rosen, New York; Shane Campbell, Chicago; Park View Gallery, Los Angeles; HOME, Manchester, UK; and Rodeo Gallery, Istanbul. His solo exhibition Chicago Works: Paul Heyer was on view in Spring 2018 at MCA Chicago, where he had previously been included in group shows. His work has been written about in Artforum, The New York Times and FlashArt. Heyer lives and works in Chicago.

Above: "The Artist," 2019

JIN SHAN

Hall of Mirrors

OPENING RECEPTION

Saturday, June 1, 2019, 7-10pm

June 1 – July 13, 2019

Night Gallery is proud to present Hall of Mirrors, an exhibition of new sculptures by Shanghai-based artist Jin Shan. At the forefront of a generation of emerging Chinese artists, Jin has risen to prominence as a playful voice of dissent. Utilizing varied materials, he employs humor and satire to reflect the experiences of young people grappling with significant societal shifts while also commenting on universal power structures that exist across the cultural spectrum. This will be his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

In 1678, Louis XIV began construction on The Hall of Mirrors within the Palace of Versailles, a space that served to connect the royal, private quarters to the palace chapel. In this corridor, the king was greeted by courtiers jockeying for his favor. In addition to displaying the opulence of the empire — mirrors were among the rarest and most expensive items to own in the 17th century — it is said that the mirrors were employed to distort and disorient Louis XIV’s subjects. In this exhibition, Jin conflates the idea of this mirrored corridor with the classical sculpture halls of western history.

For Jin, the sculpture hall has come to represent Western traditional aesthetics and humanistic values. Here the artist collapses this paradigm with Louis XIV’s manipulation of his audience, creating a raucous and contradictory space. His installation interrogates the authority and the draw of the classical human figure, imbuing it with a more forceful tenor. These familiar and iconic figures are reimagined with contemporary materials — mutated and reshaped with plastic, iron wire and polyphenylene sulfide. By hollowing out, melting, doubling and distending these forms, they no longer serve as archetypal representations - but instead act as manic, fragile, and fractured doubles of human bodies and experience. The visceral and alchemic nature of the works extends to the surroundings, where the artist has burned silhouettes of classical Roman columns into the walls. With this installation, Jin demonstrates that while humanist ideals have fallen far from their pedestal, nonetheless the desire for them remains.
 

Jin Shan (b. 1977) lives and works in Shanghai. Hall of Mirrors will run in conjunction with Allure of Matter at LACMA, opening May 29, 2019, an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art including sculptures by Jin Shan. He has mounted solo exhibitions at 166 ART SPACE, Shanghai;  The David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, Providence, RI; The Spencer Museum, Lawrence, KS; and ARCO, Madrid, Spain. His work is included in numerous public collections such as the M+ Museum, Hong Kong; the DSL Collection, France; The Tampa Museum of Art, FL; The Kadist Art Foundation, France; The Spencer Museum of Art, KS; The White Rabbit Museum, Australia; Uli Sigg, Switzerland; and The Trioche DeLeon Collection, Israel.

Above: "Relay," 2019

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