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Indepth Arts News:
"Brisk: Paintings by Yek"
2002-08-15 until 2002-09-28
Heather Marx Gallery
San Francisco, CA,
USA United States of America
White-hot Las Vegas artist Yek debuts his electric colored concave panels at Heather Marx Gallery August 15 - September 28, 2002. This is the first time Yek will exhibit his work in Northern California and provides an unprecedented opportunity for the Bay Area to see work by one of the most lauded artists on the West Coast. Described as elegant objects opening into ice-cream infinity, by art critic Dave Hickey (Brochure Essay, Yek and Tim Bavington, Feigen Contemporary, 2001) and as having an irresistible tug on your body, not to mention your imagination by Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel (Los Angeles Times, January 4, 2002), these are paintings not to be missed.
Using an airbrush to spray a range of colors from day-glo explosions to rich, moody nocturnes onto his concave panels, Yek creates nearly flawless atmospheric abstractions that suggest hyperkinetic landscapes and skyscapes. Yeks paintings appear to hover in space as the pristine edges curl outward, suggesting portal like structures in which the viewer may pass through time. His cartoonish, hyper-pop calligraphic lines and seamless backdrops are now punctuated with vertical bands of subtle shifts in tonality and hue. This new departure effects an added illusionary dimension and references not only the paintings by Edward Ruscha and the 1960s Plexiglass disk paintings by Robert Irwin, but also the Pop mirror paintings by Edward Lichtenstein.
As New York Times art critic Roberta Smith describes, the paintings of Yek...provide genuine visual thrills. They have an almost elastic quality, a cartoonish bounce that suggests they have just been knocked back a bit by their own optical power and finesse. Yek has achieved the levitating, disembodied opticality…and it gives his work an irrefutable present tense. (New York Times, September 28, 2001.)
IMAGE:
Swoon
35 x 35 x 3,
acrylic latex and enamel on panel
2002
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