Dike Blair, "Untitled"

Description

Dike Blair, "Untitled"
14 x 18 inches
Archival ink-jet print on paper

Artist Bio: Dike Blair (b. 1952, New Castle, Pennsylvania) uses gouache, oil, his own photographs, and strategies appropriated from Postminimalist sculpture to create intimate tableaux that transform quotidian sights and materials into exercises in formalism. A writer and teacher as well as an artist, Blair came up in the downtown scene of 1970s New York among punk rockers and Postmodernists. In the early 1980s, against prevailing art world trends toward Neo-Expressionism, he began rendering scenes from his life in gouache on paper. These ongoing diaristic paintings are devoid of human figures but nonetheless evoke the specter of the artist whose daily life plays out at a remove across their finely-wrought surfaces. Blair lives in New York and Sullivan County.

Blair’s recent solo exhibitions include Edward Hopper House, Nyack, New York (2024); Karma (Los Angeles, 2023, New York, 2024, 2022); Various Small Fires, Seoul (2020); The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2019); Linn Lühn, Düsseldorf (2019); Secession, Vienna (2016); and Jüergen Becker Gallery, Hamburg (2016). In 2022, Karma presented an exhibition of Blair’s paintings of Gloucester alongside Edward Hopper’s paintings of the same small Massachusetts city. Blair’s work is featured in the collections of the Whitney Museum, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others.

Artist Statement: For nearly four decades, Dike Blair has made realist paintings based on his own photographs. Rather than painting from snapshots of his travels, as he has many times in the past, here he focuses on visual phenomena occurring within a fifty-yard radius of his Catskills home and studio, namely skies, rendered in gouache.

These paintings of sky and water never veer into abstraction, rather, they are always recognizable representations of an environment. His skies are numerous, varied, and sensitively observed. In one, a sugar-spun cloud rises from the treetops into a perfectly flat, cerulean plane made both matte and silky as only gouache can; in another, the moon’s glow adulterates an inky sky into lighter, watery passages. Chemtrails, the moon and stars, or a single crack of lightning mark the heavens as such, and Blair anchors his relatively empty expanses with slices of horizon, branches and leaves, or even his house.