NYAB Event - Daniel Subkoff Exhibition

Daniel Subkoff Exhibition

James Fuentes LLC

This event has ended.

James Fuentes presents a solo exhibition featuring new works by Daniel Subkoff.

With raw materials such as canvas, smoke, and tarnished metal, Subkoff alludes to developments as disparate as Cave Painting and Arte Povera while embedding it in a more contemporary dialectic. While on the surface it seems that paint would be the most esseantial element of a painting, Subkoff suspects we must perceive it in reverse. For the artist, painting is a multi-dimensional activity that begins with building a skeletal frame, stretching its skin and preparing its ground. In his recent work Subkoff celebrates the moment of uncertainty before the first mark is made. He suggests a framework where inherent relationships are uniquely present and that which is often overlooked becomes the focus.

In “It’s Really Nothing (Celestial Jackpot)”, Subkoff has created an offering to the unmarked surface. Using incense and the soot or smoke it creates, the artist refers to his first job restoring antique Asian cloth paintings. Here the smoke becomes a part of the work rather than a nuisance to be removed. In “Dire Displacement” the artist presents the hood of a tow-truck that had been set on fire, presumably an act of retribution for unjust towing, as a readymade artwork. This particular truck had previously been elaborately custom painted with flames running over the hood and along the sides. The actual flame reacting with the painted flames and the metal created one of the most hypnotizing ‘paintings’ the artist had ever seen, so he removed it from the condemned truck body, liberating it from its scrap metal destiny.

Subkoff was born in 1974 in New York City and currently lives in Manhattan and works in Brooklyn. He has exhibited at Whitechapel Gallery, London, Ileana Tounta Gallery, Athens, James Fuentes, New York, and Canada Gallery, New York.