28 Sep 2008

'At Home' at Lincart

Lawrence Rinder is currently the Director of the Berkeley Art Museum. Previously, he was the Dean of the California College of the Arts as well as the curator of the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

At Home brings together four extraordinary, rarely seen artists: Dieter Roth, Franklin Williams, Ajit Chauhan, and Brian Chippendale. Historically speaking they have little in common, but their work draws on similar energies and themes.

Dieter Roth (1930-1998) was a Swiss artist who spent much of his life in Iceland. Unusually prolific, Roth created vast numbers of artist's books, sound recordings, furniture, multiples, paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, jewelry, and installations. His work displayed a remarkable capacity to balance between the most refined and classical sensibility and an utterly chaotic, even antagonistic approach. His early work, primarily graphic design, was strongly influenced by art concrete, the precise, geometrically based style popularized by the Swiss artist Max Bill. After moving to Iceland in 1957, Roth's art became increasingly eccentric, incorporating, for example, various foodstuffs, which he would allow to rot and decompose over time. At the beginning of 1965, he moved to Providence to take a position at the Rhode Island School of Design. At RISD, he worked with students to typeset and print his first book of poetry, Scheisse. Neue Gedichte von Dieter Rot (Shit. New Poems by Dieter Rot).

Franklin Williams (b. 1940) has spent his entire artistic life in the Bay Area. While a student at the California College of Arts and Crafts in the early 1960s, Williams developed a distinctive approach to art making—combining an eclectic use of materials, intense concentration on pattern and detail, and exploration of personal and imaginary images and themes—that has continued to propel his work until today. His art is characterized by a tension between classical harmonies of proportion, composition, and scale and a tendency toward bacchanalian excess, eroticism, and—at times—ugliness. He has been a highly influential teacher for generations of young artists at SFAI and CCA. Williams' approach to art and life is all-inclusive.

Ajit Chauhan (b. 1981) works primarily in film and drawing. His works on paper are remarkable for their incredible detail and wondrous concatenation of real and imaginary forms. He draws inspiration from sources as varied as Paul Klee, Tantric diagrams, and his own travels through India. 'Drawing is kind of like sleeping with your eyes open,' says Chauhan. 'In the best of times things materialize without choice.' Nevertheless, Chauhan frequently returns to a number of images and themes: beards and hair, feathers, beaks, teeth, and masks. There is a dynamic quality of becoming in his drawings, as forms evolve and words unfold before our eyes.

Brian Chippendale (b. 1973) was a founding member of the legendary Fort Thunder collective in Providence, Rhode Island. He is widely known as both a musician (drummer/vocalist for Lightning Bolt, Mindflayer, and Black Pus) and comic artist (Maggots, Ninja). Chippendale's music and art are marked by frenzy, precision, and intensity. The over-accumulation of sound/noise and image/mark result, paradoxically, in an experience of strangely harmonious calm. Chippendale's art is comprised of both abstract passages and figurative images which, in the comic format, are arrayed in narrative or quasi-narrative progressions. His recent art explores the possibilities of single, autonomous pictures and is collaged from fragments of the many silkscreen posters he produced for band and wrestling shows at Fort Thunder and continues to produce for events in and around his home in Providence, RI.