Home Studio | James Esber
“For James Esber, it is the finger pressing of the plasticine, the intimate gesture of the hand pushing at the material, working close up and then stepping back and watching an image stretch, distort. The parameters of pop culture are pushed out in a sometimes psychedelic mind-bend, a transgression that explores what happens when you break the rules. Esber takes familiar images, politically loaded icons that echo back to the artist’s childhood, and treats these hallowed images as objects, distorting and then recreating them in new material.” (— A.M. Homes, from an exhibition curated by Barbara Toll as part of Yaddo’s centenary celebrations.)
Left:
“Hero”
2021
Acrylic on PVC panel
48 x 62.5 inches
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Right:
“Sleeper”
2021
Acrylic on PVC panel
48 x 62.5 inches
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“If the digital filter asserts itself through much of Esber’s oeuvre, it is tempered through a decidedly analog love of material and surface. No doubt it is a love shared by many at the forefront of today’s figurative resurgence. However, unlike the work of Chason Matthams, Sascha Braunig, and Emily Mae Smith, Esber’s paintings are less frequently concerned with volumetric form than the figure’s precarious balance between digital disintegration and material reconstitution. Ultimately, this tension animates many of Esber’s projects, and enables him to ricochet between surrealist riffs, Cubist fractures, Photoshop smears, comics-style flatness, and painting’s agitated physical life. ” (—David Geers at BOMB)
Right:
“Sleeping Hunter”
2021
Acrylic on paper mounted to PVC panel
11 x 14 inches
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Left:
“Dented Head”
2021
Acrylic on paper mounted to PVC panel
14 x 11 inches
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Right:
“Adonis”
2021
Acrylic on paper mounted to PVC panel
16 x 12 inches
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“The sparks that drive my work are the pawed-over icons of popular culture, some stuck in my head since childhood. The list includes sugary-sweet Hummel figurines, cowboys, war photos, crushed cars, pornography, and Tricky Dick Nixon. Gathering these images and subjecting them to a variety of digital contortions, I remake them as paintings and drawings through a process of hyperbolic mark-making. When you look at my paintings, you’re looking at images resurrected and reconstructed.” (James Esber)
James Esber received a BFA from the Cleveland Art Institute and studied at Skowhegan, ME and Temple University in Rome, Italy. He is the recipient of a NYFA Fellowship award, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and has participated in residencies such as MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, among others. His works are in public collections including The Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL, The Tang Museum, Skidmore College, Northern New England Museum of Art, and San Jose Museum of Art. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and is represented by Pierogi Gallery.