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James Esber
No Natural Ingredients
Catalogue available with essay
by Robert Storr

Tangle, 2005
Ink and Watercolor on Paper
39 x 28.5 inches
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Press Release
In his new
work, James Esber continues to address notions of distortion, stereotyping,
and perception. For this exhibition, his fifth one-person show in New
York, Esber intentionally exploits a variety of media (plasticine, painting
and work on paper) and a wide range of appropriated icons (from the flag
raisers on Iwo Jima to Michael Jackson) to disrupt our preconceived notions
of reality. As Ken Johnson writes, “Like the paintings of Peter
Saul and Philip Guston, these viscerally sensuous works plumb the polymorphously
perverse depths of the American psyche.” (The New York Times)
Esber’s tendency is to use unnatural materials and unexpected juxtapositions
to show how we perceive and portray things in distorted ways. Robert Storr
describes Esber’s style of juxtaposition as a kind of “clunky
elegance.” “...[B]oth the clunkiness and the elegance are
the product of an imagination keyed to contradiction, and of a talent
capable of calibrating the artifice to produce both effects with apparently
natural unnaturalness.” (Storr, 2006)
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