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October 25, 2007- December 22, 2007
Dean Byington
Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects
535 W 22nd StWe are pleased to announce our second solo presentation of new works by Dean Byington. The exhibition will include nine paintings and four collages produced during the past two years.
Byington’s narrative landscapes are rendered in the style of nineteenth-century illustrated books. The newest works evince a greater sense of the artist’s characteristic horror vacui, with an even denser profusion of diverse elements that recall minimalist painting, the surrealist collages of Max Ernst, and the assemblages and psychedelic images that originated in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the San Francisco Bay Area where Byington has lived and worked since the mid-1980s. Obsessively handmade, these works emerge from personal recollections and cultural observations, with imagery that may be exquisitely articulated in black and white, or barely visible, as though viewed through a monochrome fog of misty blue, pink, or green.
To create these unique works, Byington trained himself to draw in the style of nineteenth-century wood engravings and invented an elaborate, multi-layered process of drawing, printing, and painting. He photocopies his own drawings as well as illustrations from old books, prints, and sometimes actual objects, and combines them into collages which are then transformed into a series of silkscreens that he uses to print the underlying imagery in oil paint on to finely prepared linen canvases. Byington completes each work by glazing, scraping, and over-painting the canvas to eliminate all traces of the silkscreened matrix. While the paintings are quite large, the collages are extremely small, composed of delicately cut bits of photocopied drawings and prints. In his introductory essay for the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, Carter E. Foster notes:
The all-consuming quality of his work links the artist to an important group of West Coast practitioners ... One also thinks of the “finish fetish” work of John McCracken or the ceramicist/sculptor Ken Price, both obsessive in their use of surface density to create optically captivating art. Byington’s method has parallels to theirs in that the final product is a summation of many layers of production.
Dean Byington was born in 1958 in Santa Monica, California, and grew up in the greater Los Angeles area. After studying physics and architecture at U.C. Santa Cruz, he completed his B.A. in Art in 1987 at the University of California at Berkeley, and received a Master of Fine Arts there in Painting in 1988. His first solo exhibition took place in 1994 at Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco.
Works by Dean Byington are in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and many other distinguished institutions and private individuals.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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