Tuesday February 4 2020 - Saturday
February 29 2020
Petzel
Gallery is pleased to present Waiting for the Next Nirvana, an exhibition of
new paintings by Canada-born, Los Angeles-based artist Jon Pylypchuk. The show
will be on view from January 9 to February 29, 2020 and marks Pylypchuk’s first
solo exhibition at the gallery’s Chelsea location in nine years.
An
expression and result of Pylypchuk’s past and current years as a rock musician
(he is a founder of KISK, the KISS cover band) and as an artist, the paintings
featured in Waiting for the Next Nirvana are imbued with nostalgia,
anticipation, energy, confidence, and, foremost, seductive and rebellious
emotion. The works, with titles such as I don’t need flowers, I just need you,
Basketball season is over cupcake!, and Your goodness keeps this badass begging
are made of fabric, wood, glue, watercolor, glitter, black cue balls, and
polyurethane, among other materials, and evoke feelings of existential angst.
“Guns n
Roses took a swing at the establishment in 1987 with Appetite for Destruction,
and garbage cans across the Southland were loaded with hairspray canisters that
would never be used again,” says Pylypchuk. But “by 1991, in four short years
Guns n Roses had become the establishment. Lush orchestration, epic songs,
backup singers, extra musicians to fill out the sound, Axl Rose seated behind a
piano…Long gone were the days he would dive off stage to punch someone in the
face who’d pissed him off. Now he wouldn’t even go on stage until he ‘felt
right’ and everything was perfect.” So much for Grunge; much less teen spirit.
“I don’t
think mainstream rock music has been shook up, re-envisioned, made exciting
again,” says Pylypchuk, who is also known by his alter ego Rudy Bust. “By 1994
Kurt Cobain blew his brains out. Maybe it was heroin, maybe it was stomach
pain, maybe it was fear about where music was going. In any case, that ended it
and we were left with Creed and Nickelback and a host of others who profited on
sounding like safe substitutes.”
Pylypchuk
stopped trying to be a rock star in 1995 because, he says, “I wasn’t good at
writing songs. Instead, making things without thinking, pulling things out of
the nothingness, gluing shoelaces and scraps of things to paper and making them
talk, documenting my anxieties over mortality was where I landed. Art had no
rules and still shouldn’t. Things weren’t perfect then and they aren’t perfect
now. That time in my life was my first nirvana.”
For this
exhibition Pylypchuk has conjured a body of work that has been marinating for
20 years. “I have been sitting in the studio for the past year looking at my
paintings and asking myself ‘Could I be the next Nirvana?’”
Pylypchuk
is a multidisciplinary artist who works in painting, sculpture, installation
and video. Working with simple materials (fake fur, wood, fabric, sheet metal,
beer cans, electric light bulbs, polyurethane foam, etc.), Pylypchuk
reinterprets the collage and bricolage practices derived from Art Brut. Often
his ‘creatures’ draw upon the animal world to explore the frailty of human
existence and social relationships. Pylypchuk’s characters seem to have lost
their way, appearing in a wounded condition, harmed by either themselves or by
others. They combine a hearty dose of cynicism and anger at the unfairness of
it all with a wicked sense of survivalist humor.
Born in
1972 in Winnipeg, Canada, Pylypchuk studied at the University of Manitoba
School of Art, where he co-founded the collective known as the Royal Art Lodge
in 1996 with fellow artists Michael Dumontier, Marcel Dzama, Neil Farber, Drue
Langlois and Adrian Williams. Its members were mostly graduates from the
University of Manitoba, Canada who were united in their outsider status and who
liked to break the unwritten rules of artistic production. They sent childlike
drawings to the National Gallery of Canada, suggesting they exhibit them, and
held all-night drawing sessions. In 1998 he moved to Los Angeles, where he is
currently based.
Since
coming to international attention, Pylypchuk has exhibited in New York,
Düsseldorf, Münster, London, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Paris, San Francisco,
Miami, Tokyo, Montreal, Seoul, Guadalajara and St. Petersburg. His works are in
the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; The
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the
Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Saatchi Collection, London; The Museum of
Old and New Art, Berriedale; and the Whitney Museum, New York.
Event
website:http://www.petzel.com
Venue
name:Petzel Gallery
Address:456
W 18th St, New York, 10011
Cross
street: Between Ninth Ave and Tenth Ave