20 Sep 2010

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles presents Heather Gwen Martin: Recreational Systems

Luis De Jesus is very pleased to present Heather Gwen Martin's second solo exhibition, titled 'Recreational Systems', on view from September 11 through October 16, 2010.

Drawing from comics, television, and everyday situations, Heather Gwen Martin's abstract paintings explore playfully violent scenarios where household objects morph into cartoon weapons and imagined forces battle each other against bright, acidic-hued backgrounds. With this new body of work Martin continues to subvert the traditional rules of painting, offering canvases whose flat spaces open up 'three-dimensionally' in ways that skew balance, proportionality, and composition. Contrasting this tension and awkward balance is her clean, controlled brush work and highly saturated colors, qualities directly influenced by her experience over the past decade as a digital colorist/illustrator for comics and animation.

Martin acknowledges, 'Technology has affected the way that my hand, eye, and brain work because I spent a lot of time at a computer with my hand making shapes and color. You have to be precise with your hand. It's not real color—it's the color on the screen, instant and artificial with clean lines precise down to the pixel.'

In his introduction to the color catalog that accompanies this exhibition, artist Kim MacConnel writes:

'Heather's work is uncompromising in its originality, inventiveness, beauty and mystery. The more I look at her paintings, the more I question the source of her vision. Her paintings evoke the body of works forged by such historic figures as Conrad Marca-Relli, Roberto Matta, Ashile Gorky, the pre-'action painting' of Jackson Pollock, and his wife Lee Krasner, as well as John Altoon. They all seem linked to Heather's work. They all derive from the Surrealist tradition. Not that of Dali or de Chirico, but the lineage that sought to breakdown literal representation, while still utilizing it as a basis to skew perception. Their drawings are 'readable' as with representation, but barely. …'The psychological space of cartoons defies pragmatism, convention, rationality. If one were to try to take this concept and abstract it in the late 1950s it would appear expressionistic in its gestural and compositional rendering, like Disney: hence Altoon. If one were to take this concept and attempt to render in 2010, it would, to me, reinvent this notion again, of the line between the real and the surreal as evidenced in the contemporary print and animated cartooning of this century: hence Heather Gwen Martin.'

Arts and entertainment news blog CultureMob.com exclaims: 'Heather Gwen Martin: Top Show at Bergamot Station', and George Melrod, Editor of Art Ltd. magazine calls it 'a knock-out show from a talented young painter to watch.'

Heather Gwen Martin was born 1977 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. Martin studied at the University of California, San Diego, where she received a BA with honors (1999), and at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2001).

For further information about Heather Gwen Martin's work, please call the Gallery at 310-453-7773, or email: gallery@luisdejesus.com.

Upcoming gallery exhibitions and events include: Christopher Russell: 'Runaway', opening Friday, October 22nd; NADA Art Fair (Solo Projects: Christopher Russell), Miami Beach, December 2-5; 2010 California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, opening October 23rd; and Seth Augustine: 'Mash Ups', opening Saturday, December 11, 2010.