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The Strangeness Will Wear Off
David Castillo Gallery | Miami Beach, FL | December 3, 2018 - January 31, 2019
David Castillo Gallery presents The Strangeness Will Wear Off an exhibition of works in painting by Melissa Brown, Cynthia Cruz, Maria de los Angeles RJ, Natalie Frank, Tomashi Jackson, Pepe Mar, Jillian Mayer, Robert Melee, Eamon Ore-Giron, Shinique Smith, Vaughn Spann, and Wendy White.
The Strangeness Will Wear Off proposes the enduring legacy of Modernism as a radical and boundary-pushing form into the contemporary moment. The represented works each look to the long history of twentieth-century art-making as a stylistic reference point to be borrowed, rearranged, and re-explored in the twenty-first. In varying degrees of historical pastiche and revisioning, the artists in this exhibition untangle new approaches in the pictorial strategies of Figurative Expressionism, Action Painting, Minimalism, Neo-Dada and other Modernist movements; and the long-established aesthetics of these forms find renewed context, voice, and relevance through the dynamic experimentation and questioning of these artists working today.
The exhibition’s title takes its name from an unaired 1950 radio interview of Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock, in which he meditates on the conditions and novelties of the art contemporary to any period:
New needs need new techniques… Each age finds its own technique… [The] strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.
All art is contemporary to its time, and strangeness is the marker of unfamiliarity, of new ideas bubbling up through the visual language of a new age and artistic convention.
Pepe Mar creates bold and energetic fabric paintings in a collage process that loads their surfaces with layered references to art history, the queer club culture of the last thirty years, and his own artistic practice. There are clear affinities to be drawn between Mar’s work and that of American painter Robert Rauschenberg, evidenced in their use of non-traditional materials and an exuberance for drawing from the expansive visuality of popular culture.