Booth C04
David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to participate in ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair with a solo presentation of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Will Boone. Notable for their scale, intensity of color, and distinct, sculptural materiality, these major paintings constitute Boone's first new body of work since his 2019–2020 solo exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in his native Texas. ART021 will be on view at the Shanghai Exhibition Center Saturday and Sunday, November 14–15, 2020. A private viewing for invited guests will take place Thursday and Friday, November 12–13. The gallery and the fair take seriously the health and safety of visitors and staff and are following the recommended Covid-19 guidelines accordingly.
Will Boone draws from a variety of American subcultures to produce paintings, sculptures, videos, and installations that map the features of sociological and iconographic landscapes. The aesthetics of bars and cattle ranches; the materials used in custom automotive work and on hobby figurines; and the frenetic energy of punk and hardcore music and horror movies are but a few of the thematic categories to which he makes reference. "Reference" is perhaps too limiting a word: Boone inhabits these categories on an archetypal level, teasing out their emotional valences and producing works that sometimes border upon pure abstraction. The result is an artistic project that is remarkable for its visual and conceptual focus, especially given the heterogeneous nature of his processes and mediums.
Boone's paintings are perhaps the clearest examples of his ability to condense broad swaths of research and material experimentation into searing, indelible compositions. His most recent canvases emerge from an ongoing chronology that has evolved in the direction of dissolution and sculptural immediacy. If earlier paintings were dominated by bold, glyph-like forms that resembled written letters—and subsequent ones found him introducing objects like flags in ways that disrupted hard-edged shapes and imbued his surfaces with palpable relief—his newest works incorporate materials like duct tape, a cowboy's lariat, and a flattened sake lantern in large, open fields of resin and acrylic paint. Many of the paintings are dominated by a vivid red hue and a series of interlocking linear shapes, both of which Boone has described as "arterial" in a nod both to the color of highly oxygenated blood and the organization of highways around urban centers.
For all of their immersive power, Boone's newest paintings are also full of intricate details and juxtapositions indebted in equal measure to careful construction and the free movement of materials. Pouring paint and resin and spreading it with rollers, Boone creates circumstances in which certain elements press forward toward the surface and others recede into the painting's depths, seemingly of their own volition. This lends the work an unnerving aliveness, giving new meaning to the term "action painting" and calling to mind the geological forces at play in tar pits or underground in oil wells. In these thick and surprisingly luminous fields, relics of Americana and symbols of the West float into view, evoking a mythical amalgam of Californian and Texan moods and vistas. Boone's forays into pure abstraction always maintain a palpable sense of place; increasingly they also communicate the energies and contradictions of particular moments in time, channeling both the anxieties of our age and the drive to ground universal themes in local conditions, characters, and things.
Will Boone (b. 1982, Houston, Texas) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2019); Galerie Patrick Seguin Paris (with David Kordansky gallery as the 2018 featured gallery of the annual Carte Blanche series); David Kordansky Gallery (2018); Karma, New York (2017); and the Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2014). A major installation was featured in Desert X 2017, Coachella Valley, California (2017). Other group shows include Zombies: Pay Attention!, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2019); White Trash, Luhring Augustine Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York (2017); Prototypology, Gagosian Gallery, Rome (2016); Andrea Rosen Gallery (with William Pope.L, 2016); Fétiche, Venus Over Manhattan, New York (2016); and Love For Three Oranges, Gladstone Gallery, Brussels (2015). Boone lives and works in Los Angeles.

mpefm CHINA art fair press release
Collectors Preview:
2020, November 12, 14:00-20:00 By invitation only Last entry at 19:00
2020, November 13, 13:00-20:00 By invitation only Last entry at 19:00
Public days:
2020, November 14&15, 11:00-18:00 (Last entry at 17:00)

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