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Catharine Clark Gallery

March 21 - May 10, 2009

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248 Utah Street
 San Francisco, CA 94103
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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. Philip Knoll’s recent group of collaged drawings and paintings on panel and canvas is titled Paradise Found. Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. The poem concerns the Judeo-Christian story of the Fall of Man; the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan, and the expulsion of the first couple from the Garden of Eden. Milton's purpose is to "justify the ways of God to men" and elucidate the conflict between God's eternal foresight and free will. Like Barsness, Knoll has lifted a literary reference (and inverted it); uses a cartoon-like approach to his drawing as a way of addressing subjects such as sex, death, and male-machismo; and attempts to collapse time periods, religious references, allusions to popular culture, and politics. Also like Barsness he is interested in contradiction and how to convey the unintelligibility of the world in images. He uses humor as a way of “breaking the fall” for the viewer. The list of religious and historical figures that appear in his work include Jesus, MacArthur, Marilyn Monroe, and Richard Pryor, among others, thereby serving up a complex portrait in any given painting as a way of imagining the incomprehensible. Philip Knoll was born in Mississippi, Louisiana and educated at the University of Texas, ultimately receiving his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. After living in New York for several years, Knoll moved to Monterey, Massachusetts, where he continues to make his work and exhibit nationally. His works on paper and canvas are rendered in an obsessive, line-driven style that often takes its cues from comic and pop imagery. Knoll has been a recipient of a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship, and his work has been included in museum and non-profit exhibitions at: The Palo Alto Art Center; De Cordova Museum and Sculpture Park; John Michael Kohler Arts Center; Armory Center for the Arts; Fosdick-Nelson Gallery; Alfred University School of Art and Design; Muscarelle Museum of Art; White Columns; Museum of Modern Art in Durham, North Carolina; and Laguna Gloria Art Museum. His work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and the De Cordova Museum and Sculpture Park. Knoll exhibits in New York with Morgan Lehman Gallery. Paradise Found is his third solo exhibition with Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.