This Saturday night (February 21st), Jonathan LeVine Gallery (529 West 20th Street) will be presenting new works from acclaimed painter and illustrator Phil Hale. Life Want to Live will be the American artist’s first solo show in four years as well as his debut with the Chelsea showspace, introducing his surreal and distorted images of life to fans in New York.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the London-based artist will be releasing a new book that shares its title with the show. In the introduction, Michiko Oki states the following – “Hale accumulates distortions, compresses them into a stratum, then cracks them open again and layers other images and shapes until the significance, or the narrative of each layer, disappears into another. Rather than a collage that expects ‘new’ meaning to emerge out of the juxtaposition of different visual orientations, his paintings aim for the disappearance of one image into another, one narrative into another, one system of seeing into another, and are haunted by the desire to move away from what it originally was. As a result, Hale’s images throw us into an accumulation of ambiguity and plausibility. With their endless reflections and resemblances, they evoke an obscure feeling of anxiety that makes us long for meanings and stories behind the shapes.”
Discuss this show here.
