Converge Gallery is proud to present the work of nine young emerging artists for Fountain Art Fair in Chicago. Divergent conceptual interests and artistic methods come together to form an exciting and important avenue in the conversation of contemporary art. The viewer should find a stylistically diverse play on subject matter ranging from commodity and culture, American class hierarchy, celebrity fixations to the more playful celebration of skater and graffiti culture and illustrative musings of beauty, romance and the grotesque. The work provides a thoughtful contribution to the discourse of relevant and fresh contemporary art practice.
Seth Goodman blends an artistic language reminiscent of the old masters with a hard-edged critique of the American class structure by painting his unforgivingly forward renderings that focus on the human folly and circumstance of America’s untouchables.
Liz Parrish acts as a conduit between the earthly and the ineffable realm of metaphysics with her brilliantly realized characters and scenarios. Working purely from her imagination, almost channeling from a world unseen, Parish molds unique realities that bring to mind the air of tension seen in William Blake’s work and the comic undertones of Tim Burton’s creations.
Tyler Coey plays on low/high barriers in fine art with his stylistic references to illustration and air brush. He references the rich illustration tradition of the west coast by bringing to life archetypes of beauty and love.
Australian artist Johnny Romeo uses a painterly form of the pop art language to bring to mind questions of originality of identity, consumerist obsession, and celebrity worship. His radiant palette and sure hand binds together a sensibility found in mainstream advertising design with the spectacle of pure brush-to-canvas plastic painting technique.
Renowned for his brooding evocative paintings, South African artist Ryan Hewett continues his exploration and his passion for oil. He continues to push the boundaries of what would seem to be portraits that or not portraits at all but windows into himself. Ryan has been painting professionally for 12 years and his works are highly sough after. We at Converge Gallery are very happy to be the first and only gallery currently representing his work in the U.S.
Brooklyn-based artist, Dark Cloud, shows the studio artist side of his dualistic street artist-self with the works displayed in Fountain Chicago. Employing a combination of fine art painting practice with the raw and spontaneous world of graffiti and street art, Dark Cloud’s gallery work emanates a mannerist-like tension between potential and kinetic energy.
New York City artist Trey Speegle was born in Texas in 1960 and is known for recontextualizing vintage paint by number paintings and combining them with words and phrases that deconstructs the genre in a variety of ways. Trey has collaborated with Stella McCartney, Fred Perry, Anthropology Home and others and he exhibits works on paper in 22 Jonathan Adler shops across the U.S. and in London. His work is collected widely and the Microsoft Art Collection recently acquired his iconic “You Are Here” painting for the Lobby of their San Francisco headquarters.
Chad Andrews maintains a private art studio at the Pajama Factory in Williamsport Pennsylvania and teaches print making and two-dimensional design at Bloomsburg University. Appearing to live three different lives, his artwork is fueled by the variety of experiences from each day. He weaves and embeds notations, images, and events into dense compositions that express the world(s) around him. Andrews received his BFA in studio art from Kutztown University (Kutztown, PA) and his MFA in print making from the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA). His work has been shown at numerous galleries around the country and abroad. Primarily a print maker, Andrews uses all his skills in his work and often includes a combination of drawing, painting with the print making.
Cornell once said “Everything can be used, but of course one doesn’t know it at the time. How does one know what a certain object will tell another?” If you would visit Clock Work Box’s studio you would see how firmly he believes that sentiment, it is a guiding principal to his artistic process. The space he works in is covered in bits and pieces from bygone eras. Sometimes he uses cast off objects that he finds in a local thrift stores and other times he use objects found at the many antique stores in rural Pennsylvania. He thinks about who may have used a tool or a toy in his work. He thinks about how these things were once new and valued but have now come to be in possession, discarded and unwanted. He attempts to return value to these items as a metaphor for redemption.
Converge Gallery will be exhibiting at Fountain Art Fair in Chicago from Sept 20 – September 22nd. Fountain Art Fair is being held at the following address: 2233 Throop Street, Chicago, IL 60608. To purchase tickets, click here.