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27/5/2005

Erick Swenson

Q.E.D., Los Angeles

Erick Swenson

Q.E.D., a new space in Los Angeles for the exhibition of contemporary art, is a collaboration between David Quadrini of Angstrom Gallery in Dallas and Elizabeth Dee of Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York. Q.E.D. is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition by Erick Swenson at 2622 South La Cienega Boulevard. A reception for the artist will be held on Saturday, May 28, from 6 to 8 pm.

Erick Swenson creates uncanny sculptural tableaux that feature strangely mutated animals in circumstances fraught with pathos. His untitled piece seen at the Hammer Museum in 2003 and at the Whitney Biennial the following year portrayed a young, hairless, and ethereally white deer rubbing the velvet from his antlers on a large Persian carpet. Both deer and carpet were cast in the same polyurethane resin and then painted and finished with a high degree of verisimilitude.

In the work exhibited at Q.E.D., a large white plinth melts into a scene of snowy slush covering a pavement of Belgian blocks. A white deer, perhaps the same one, slightly older with a larger rack, sprawls on the ground. His head weighed down by the icicles that have grown from his antlers, one hind leg raised and bearing more icicles, he appears to have frozen to the pavement at the same time he melts into the snow. His eyes remain open, however, conscious of his plight.

Swenson draws on a wide range of sources, from natural history dioramas, Hollywood special effects, science fiction, and fairy tales to the anthropomorphic sentimentality of Victorian animal painting. He combines a kind of photorealist rendering in three dimensions with a surrealist vision of the natural world and an operatic sense of the mythic. His animals seem stand-ins for human conditions, their physical predicaments mirror our own emotional situations. With remarkable craftsmanship and sly humor, he deftly weaves together the absurd and the tragic.

Born in 1972, Erick Swenson is currently exhibiting in the exhibition Springtide at the ICA in Philadelphia. He was featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and in solo projects at the Hammer Museum in 2003 and the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich in 2002. One-man exhibitions of his work have been held at James Cohan Gallery in New York and Angstrom Gallery in Dallas. Swensons work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The artist lives and works in Dallas.

David Quadrini founded Angstrom Gallery in 1996. In its nine years of existence, Angstrom Gallery has given early exposure to a number of Texas artists now receiving international recognition, including Jeff Elrod, Mark Flood, Daniel Johnston, Robyn ONeil, Erick Swenson, and Brad Tucker. Angstrom Gallery has also brought to Texas a number of prominent American artists such as Anthony Goicolea, Hannah Greely, Stephen Hull, Matt Johnson, Kevin Landers, Cameron Martin, Steve Mumford, Kaz Oshiro, Paul P., Jack Pierson, Scott Reeder, and Christian Schumann.

Elizabeth Dee opened her gallery in 2000, and has worked to develop the careers of a group of American artists that include Alex Bag, Kevin Landers, Virgil Marti, Carl Ostendarp, Enoc Perez, and Pieter Schoolwerth. Elizabeth Dee Gallery has held the first United States exhibitions of internationally recognized artists such as Rowena Dring, Josephine Meckseper, and Christoph Steinmeyer. Other artists exhibited at the gallery have included Kai Althoff, Ann Craven, John Currin, Inka Essenhigh, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Marc Handelman, Sean Landers, Keith Mayerson, Richard Phillips, Blake Rayne, and Peter Rostovsky.

Angstrom Gallery and Elizabeth Dee Gallery are both members of the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA).

For more information please contact
Q.E.D. at 310.204.3334,
Angstrom Gallery at 214.823.6456,
or Elizabeth Dee Gallery at 212.924.7545.

Q.E.D. 2622 South La Cienega Boulevard Los Angeles CA 90034

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