NYAB Event - Bret Slater and Otis Jones Exhibition

Bret Slater and Otis Jones Exhibition

Louis B. James Gallery

[Image: Bret Slatre "Beepage" (2014) canvas, fabric and dental floss over wood, 7 1/4 x 5 1/2 x 1 1/4 in.]

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Louis B. James presents OTIS JONES + BRET SLATER, a two-artist show, the second of three exhibitions the pair will be mounting in Dallas, New York, and Zürich. OTIS JONES + BRET SLATER, the summer tour, commenced at Holly Johnson Gallery, Dallas, in May; the tour will conclude with an exhibition at annex14, Zürich, opening August 29. Jones and Slater will present new paintings at each venue.

Otis Jones’ paintings are at once rough-hewn and austere, subtly optical and contemplative. On hand carved, often irregularly shaped, wooden supports, Jones’ paintings combine the uniform, geometric abstraction of 1960’s minimalist painting and the sculptural presence of 1970’s abstraction, particularly Stella and Gorchov. Jones emphasizes the edges of his paintings with multiple layers of hand-sewn thread, further pushing the tension between the dimensional and optical.

Bret Slater, born forty years after Jones, also makes paintings on handmade supports in unique shapes. Where Jones’ naturalistic palette and washy use of paint reveal the organic linen beneath, Slater builds up thick layers of plastic-like acrylic paint to create a visually impenetrable surface of dizzying day-glo brilliance. Slater’s small-scale paintings are small in the extreme, the size of an IPod or other ubiquitous handheld device. The discrete and luminous blocks of color in his larger works, alongside their synthetic surfaces, call to mind action figures, comic books, and other fetishes of boyhood.

Jones and Slater met in 2009, when Slater began his masters’ studies at the Meadow School of Art at Southern Methodist University, Dallas. Since then they have developed an intergenerational relationship of mutual influence.

Otis Jones (b. 1946, Galveston, TX, lives and works in Dallas) received a B.F.A. (1969) from Kansas State University, and an M.F.A. (1972) from the University of Oklahoma. In 1982, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts–Visual Artists Fellowship Grant. His work is in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Tyler Museum of Art in Tyler, the Springfield Art Museum in Springfield, Missouri. Articles and reviews about his work have appeared in The Dallas Morning News, NY Arts, THE Magazine DFW, D Magazine, and D Home among others.

Bret Slater (b. 1987, Bronx, NY, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) received a B.F.A. (2009) from Purchase College, SUNY, Purchase, NY, and a M.F.A. (2011) from the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University, Dallas. His work is in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. His work has been reviewed in The New Yorker, The New York Observer, Modern Painters, D Magazine, NPR, F/D Luxe: The Dallas Morning News, Glasstire, Modern Luxury, and The Huffington Post, among others.