K H A S T O O

 For Immediate Release

 Artist: Greg Parma Smith

 Exhibition: Early Work 

 Dates: November 5 – December 31, 2009

 Reception: Thursday November 5, 2009 from 6 to 9 pm

 Khastoo Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by
New York based artist Greg Parma Smith. Titled Early Work, the theme
of this collection centers on the critical and aesthetic education of
a child and the formalization of artistic desire. In a series of
meticulously painted oil on canvas works depicting crayons, pencils,
stickers and other scholastic art supplies, Parma Smith offers the
viewer a lexicon of creative utensils that attract libidinal
fascination. The Work in question is a child’s assimilation of rules
and limits defining appropriate art-play. For Parma Smith, integration
of these strictures, regardless of whether they are tacitly accepted
or explicitly rejected, helps define the path to “Artist.” He
dramatizes the schism between art’s requisite sophistication and the
quirky naivety of primary creative tools, and herein the paintings
stage a volley of determinate “play” against dense and developed
adult practice. The paintings mimic the exchange, assuming the
discipline of classic European technique and old master painting
tradition amidst the buoyancy of Crayola colors and playground
invention. Ghostly masks and gooey dots adhered to the surface of some
canvases penetrate the planar field and evoke strange juxtapositions.

 The 1960s witnessed many European painters reimaging the familiar,
the textures of everyday life, to extend the medium’s conceptual
reach and to confront and examine the world around us. From Konrad
Klapheck to Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, these artists used
painting as a platform for an analysis of contemporary experiences.
Parma Smith’s Early Work explores how scrutiny toward the attendant
values of two pleasing tests of artistic competency, objective realism
or hard-edged (coloring book) painting, is another way to step back
from contemporary life. In these pictures, style of execution (gamely
meeting traditional criteria such as verisimilitude and "staying
within the lines") rubs up against subject matter, almost competing
for the more pedagogical association. Perhaps it’s not as dry an
examination as we propose and Parma Smith lives somewhere between
Sesame Street and the Hacienda. In either case, dissolution is
prevalent, as is a union of play, freedom and critical thinking.

 Greg Parma Smith was born in 1983 in Cambridge, Massachussetts and
currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received his MFA from
Columbia University, and in 2008 had a one person exhibition at the
Swiss Institute, New York. This will be the artist’s first solo
presentation in Los Angeles.

 7556 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90046 / (323) 472 6498 /
www.khastoo.com



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