Steve Hicks “Fabrications”

George Billis Gallery

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Current location: 521 West 26th Street, 7th Floor

George Billis Gallery presents its sixth solo show with Stephen Hicks, “Fabrications.” The exhibition spotlights the evolution of Hicks’ paintings from a rigorous, process driven abstract language to a more open, forceful and physical dialect. This new work exhibits an improvisational choreography of accident and intention that generates unexpected relationships between line, plane and color. Several diptychs reinforce these odd and unanticipated juxtapositions. While de Kooning’s late “ribbon” paintings have been a major recent influence, he has shifted his gaze toward Murray, Pollock, Krasner, and Gorky.

For Hicks painting has become a way to construct a realm that feels both real and imaginary; a way to see the unseen. He describes this fabrication as making sense of a confusing dream where the images and facts become tangible and plastic. As Lou Kahn asks a brick what it wants to be, Hicks attempts to unfold the nonrepresentational story each painting wants to convey. Traces of mark and edge become the equivalents of doubt, memory and time. Reoriented lines converge in energetic tangles while planes define architectural or topographic form. The results evoke an evolving abstract narrative that seems at once surprising and obvious.

As the painter Trevor Winkfield writes, “It’s not so much that Hicks now follows Klee’s example and takes his line for a walk, as he allows the painting to take him over, in the process discovering what we were told in our youthful instruction manuals: painting is fun. And fun for the diligent painter is, of course, one of the benevolent by-products of struggle.”

Steve Hicks (b. Stamford CT) received his MArch from Columbia and MFA from Yale School of Art. Awards include a Purchase Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives and works in New York City.