Matthew Kirk & Uman

MATTHEW KIRK

HOW THE REST WAS WON

Louis B. James is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Matthew Kirk entitled How the Rest was Won. It is the artist’s third show with the gallery, following a 2012 solo exhibition and a three artist show in 2014. Kirk will be showing new painting, including his first on canvas, as well as new wall-mounted and hanging sculpture.

A self-taught artist, Kirk has used non-traditional, often construction-related, material in the service of chaotic though controlled abstractions. For this show he is working on canvas for the first time, unprimed and stretched over plywood panels, alongside paintings on sheet rock and blackboard masonite. The new paintings are “conflict paintings,” turbulent deconstructions of an imagined landscape alongside a serious desire to put things back in order.

Over the past several years Matthew Kirk has created and honed a visual language all his own, with a system of mark-making that references the landscape of urban blight as well as personal symbols of his Navajo heritage. In the past the work has been at times whimsical, though the new paintings reflect a darker mood.

Matthew Kirk (b. 1978, Ganado, AZ) lives and works in New York. Recently his work has been shown at the Intuit Center for Self-Taught Art, Chicago and EXPO Chicago. In July 2015 he was profiled in Modern Painters. Concurrent with the exhibition at Louis B. James, the gallery will present new work by Kirk at the Outsider Art Fair, New York, January 21-24, 2016.

UMAN

35 YEARS A BLACK SHEEP

Louis B. James is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Uman, 35 Years a Black Sheep, the gallery’s first with the artist. Uman is a multidisciplinary, self-taught artist whose work fuses intuitive abstraction with impressions of nature.

Uman’s work spans media, from painting on canvas to sculptures comprised of found and scavenged objects. A raw and emotional thread runs throughout her oeuvre, infusing the work with memories of a childhood and adolescence spent in Somalia and Kenya alongside her relationship to the landscape of upstate New York, where she currently resides and works.

This particular exhibition is comprised of painted blankets, some made of polar fleece, some quilted, some wool, in one case a terry cloth towel. The paintings are primarily abstract, though magical figuration does appear. They function as hybrid painting/objects and call to mind animal hides and devotional garments, as well as expressionist abstract painting. The blankets are at once soft and rough, with jagged tears and dark and aggressive globs of red paint.

It is her second solo show in New York, following a debut at White Columns in September 2015. Concurrent with the exhibition at Louis B. James, the gallery will be presenting Uman’s work at the Outside Art Fair – New York, at the Metropolitan Pavilion, from January 21 through 24, 2016. Uman (b. 1980) lives and works in upstate New York, and is affiliated with the ‘137 Artists collective,’ a New York studio established by Dr. Annatina Miescher, a Swiss-born, New York-based practicing psychiatrist. Uman and other artists from the studio have collaborated with artist Bjarne Melgaard on exhibitions at Ramiken Crucible, New York, and the ICA, London, both 2012.