Liam Everett: ticklepenny lemon phosphate, Art Basel OVR:2021
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Liam Everett
ticklepenny lemon phosphate
February 9 - March 12, 2022
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Throughout his oeuvre, Liam Everett has established the studio as a site of both investigation and rehearsal. His practice is mediated by a set of open-ended, continually shifting questions as to the influence of gesture, material, obstruction, and the environment upon his work. Rather than offering definitive answers, however, his paintings further elaborate these questions and act as records of the material encounters that occur within them.
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For ticklepenny lemon phosphate, Altman Siegel is proud to present highlights from two distinct bodies of new work. In a selection of paintings atop screenprinted photographs, conceptual parallels can be identified with the tradition of absurdist and agitprop theatre. The inclusion of redundant gestures and spatial interventions – a figure’s face stuck to a table or a body replicated through the capabilities of the iPhone – further expand Everett’s quandaries into the nature of studio practice. While these works may suggest consistency in their visual assemblage, they are constructed so that each arises as a unique consequence of repetition and obstruction.
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Likewise, a series of new paintings is born out of specific material limitations, studio conditions, and mundane interventions. In these works, Everett’s gestures, when repeated and layered, prevent the emergence of explicit meaning, often lead to the erasure of the artist’s hand entirely. At other times, however, this process generates novel visual content of its own making. It is in this way that his rigorous set of rules and barriers in the studio lead to a new kind of artistic freedom that allows Everett to be entirely present. Following his relocation from France to Northern California, Everett began to regularly produce paintings in a landscape format. Thus, an additional layer to his practice has become the question of light – more specifically how it is diffused, reflected, and exists as levels of clarity – on both a formal and conceptual level. As the environmental conditions of the studio shift and come to influence the alchemic construction of the work, these paintings slowly reveal themselves. This embrace of instability and faith in extrinsic conditions situate these pieces at the very center of the artist’s oeuvre.
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For more information contact info@altmansiegel.com or 415.576.9300.
