Event

Dharma BumsPost an Event »

Catharine Clark Gallery

March 21 - May 10, 2009

Info

248 Utah Street
 San Francisco, CA 94103
Google Map »
Dharma Bums World Peace Golem, 2008, Acrylic on canvas
Catharine Clark Gallery announces concurrent solo exhibitions by American artists: Jim Barsness: Dharma Bums and Philip Knoll: Paradise Found. The media room will feature two animations by Estonian artist, Marko Mäetamm. The exhibition dates are March 21 – May 9, 2009. An opening reception for the artists is Saturday, March 21, 2009, from 4 to 6pm. In his exhibition of new paintings, Dharma Bums, Jim Barsness borrows the title of Jack Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums (1958) as a way of referencing his visual approach to conveying contradiction. In five ambitious, large-scale paintings, and a myriad of smaller works, Barsness’s use of materials is baroque and yet his use of line simple. The opposing methodologies are employed as a way to convey the notion of duality. Argyle, glitter, seed pearls and other decorative substances bejewel the surface of the works in which Barsness has simultaneously and intentionally undermined the three-dimensionality of his materials by flattening his figures through a cartoon-like approach to rendering. His use of cartooning and decorative elements also deflates the visual tension that can occur when addressing subjects such as sex and death—favorites of his and fellow exhibiting artists, Knoll and Mäetamm. Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums is an appropriate reference for Barsness’s new work. The novel, a semi-fictional account of the events that occurred in Kerouac and Gary Snyder’s lives in the years after On the Road, largely concerns the dichotomy in Kerouac's approach to his life and ideals: Buddhism versus moral corruption, interest in the outdoors and hitchhiking versus involvement with urban life, jazz clubs, poetry readings, and debauchery. Barsness’s paintings weave together different mythological stories, collapsing any linear sense of history by referring to diverse historical periods, religions artists and art movements. References to Hindu Ornamentation, Art Nouveau, graffiti, Breughel, and Spiegelman all co-exist within the frame of Barsness’s paintings. Notions of the virtuous path and the tradition of the fool and trickster play major roles informing the type of characters that populate his paintings. Jim Barsness’s paintings have been featured in solo exhibitions at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, the Kohler Art Center, and the Boise Art Museum, among other institutions. His work is in numerous public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Yale School of Art Gallery Permanent Collection, the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, and Neuberger and Berman. The subject of two career monographs and more than 15 exhibition catalogues, he has also been the recipient of several awards, including grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Elizabeth Foundation. He lives and works in Athens, Georgia. Represented in New York by George Adams Gallery, Dharma Bums is Barsness’s first solo exhibition with Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco.