LINN LÜHN

Dike Blair

May 14 - Jul 2, 2016

We are proud to present the second gallery show with american artist Dike Blair (* 1952, Pennsylvania, USA). On view are a group of new gouaches and a significant sculptural work from 2006.

Dike Blair first explored the possibilities of gouache painting more than thirty years ago. As he honed his skills in this technique - gouaches, like watercolor paintings, a closely related genre, are always executed on paper - he gradually shifted his practice from working en plein air to painting from memory and even-tually devised a characteristic studio practice in which he creates his paintings based on his snap shots. He sometimes manipulates his photographs and selects the most striking details usually working in a small format that derives from the size of commercially available watercolor paper. Blair paints in an almost photorealistic style, executing his pictures with subtlety and precision. The works on display attest to his interest in light and its reflection and his fascination with translucent materials such as glass and water. Delicate transitions and nuances between bright and dark, the mutations of colors between areas of light and shadow, and the almost imperceptible gradients they engender are the true focus of his paintings as well as his sculptures. Dike Blair finds the subjects for his gouaches by taking a careful look at fixtures of the world around him, focusing on details that are often hardly arresting. His repertoire of motifs is not limited to architectural elements, but he has deliberately kept it limited, employing repetition as a conceptual strategy. In addition to architectural depictions, recurrent motifs in his oeuvre include still lifes - often of cocktails and arrangements that suggest the interior of a bar - as well as landscapes, flowers and women’s eyes.

For the past several years, Blair has often presented his pictures in thematic pairs and in interaction with sculptures, arrangements that bring out formal aspects and contrasting principles of order. The alternation of opulence and emptiness, nature and architecture, interior and exterior, center and periphery reflects the dualism that underlies the artist’s thinking and creative approach and lets him confront a dilemma of artistic production: to make any formal choice is to discard a viable alternative that would yield a completely different result. Hence the frequent appearance in his oeuvre of pairs of paintings and sculptures that represent two versions.

Blair’s early sculptures were conceived as landscapes, interiors, or three-dimensional paintings: he arranged objects and materials such as light fixtures, carpets, and modular elements in order to engender a specific ambiance or mood and prod the viewer to reflect on the process of formal decision-making. 1)

In the sculpture to want to, 2005, the relationship between imagery and abstraction, between two- and three- dimensional form, between surface color and cast light, between tactility and depicted texture - in short between illusion and fact - are kept in a state of balance so exact it seems nearly weightless. 2)

Endowing his sculptural pieces with painterly traits and collapsing the distinction between art object and pictorial medium, Blair raises questions concerning the fundamental properties of the image and the surface beneath it. 1)

1) excerpts from: Bettina Spörr, Dike Blair ´Floors/Doors/Windows/Walls, Secession Vienna 2015
2) Nancy Princenthal, Art in America, May 2002, pp. 142-43
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