Phil Hale “Life Wants to Live”

Jonathan LeVine Gallery

poster for Phil Hale “Life Wants to Live”

This event has ended.

Jonathan LeVine Gallery presents Life Wants to Live, a series of new works by Massachusetts-born, London-based artist Phil Hale in what will be his debut solo exhibition at the gallery.

The first decade of the millennium and its attendant information surge comprehensively shattered any historic model of human activity. In Life Wants to Live, Hale’s first solo exhibition in four years, the artist wanders through the debris field. Derived from images appropriated from the internet and analogue archives, this new series of paintings and drawings are an artifact of the instability and uncertainty that characterizes our era.

Using both form and abstraction, the works convey the struggle to process, reconcile and structure an overwhelming flood of imagery and data. His realignments and mash-ups of the human form are truncated, extruded and redirected, suggesting not only the impossibility of constructing a meaningful whole from available fragments but also the unreliability of any interpretation at all.
In conjunction with Life Wants to Live, the artist will release a new book that will be available to purchase at the opening reception and shares its title with the exhibition. In the introduction, Michiko Oki states the following:
Hale accumulates distortions, compresses them into a stratum, then cracks them open again and layers other images and shapes until the significance, or the narrative of each layer, disappears into another. Rather than a collage that expects ‘new’ meaning to emerge out of the juxtaposition of different visual orientations, his paintings aim for the disappearance of one image into another, one narrative into another, one system of seeing into another, and are haunted by the desire to move away from what it originally was. As a result, Hale’s images throw us into an accumulation of ambiguity and plausibility. With their endless reflections and resemblances, they evoke an obscure feeling of anxiety that makes us long for meanings and stories behind the shapes.

Phil Hale was born in 1963 in Boston, Massachusetts and has been based in London since 1985. Born into a family of artists, Hale became an apprentice to American painter Rick Berry at the age of sixteen. Much of his early professional work was as an illustrator for clients such as Stephen King, RayGun, Playboy and Spectrum. His fine art works have been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe and held in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the Houses of Westminster, Lords Cricket Ground, Sony and Warner Bros. In 2008, Hale was commissioned to paint the portrait of Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Media

Schedule

from February 21, 2015 to March 21, 2015

Opening Reception on 2015-02-21 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Phil Hale

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