Joshua Abelow

Tif Sigfrids is pleased to present a solo presentation by Joshua Abelow entitled Moving Pictures. This is the artists first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

In his paintings, Abelow depicts the neurosis of the 21st century artist, creating a kind of self-portraiture through a handful of recurring characters. In this series we see a noodle stick figure nestled inside a buff witch running here, there, and nowhere in particular. These running witches are shown alongside new paintings of austere grey fields in which Abelow's smaller works attempt to orient themselves in the zero-g landscape. The characters in Abelow's work simultaneously facilitate and obstruct semantic clarity, delivering an allegorical hangover without the full allegory itself. All of the paintings presented here stem from a body of work made during a sojourn in rural Maryland where the artist worked in relative solitude while simultaneously undergoing a curatorial project out of a space called Freddy in nearby Baltimore.

While Abelow may be most readily categorized as a painter, his paintings can never be viewed in complete isolation from the rest of his oeuvre. The paintings constantly contaminate and are contaminated by other aspects of his diverse practice which includes writing, curating, photography, and blogging. Each of these activities supplement the other while retaining a close relationship to their origin in the everyday.

In the office, the archive of Abelow's ART BLOG ART BLOG is presented as a discreet work ART BLOG ART BLOG, Marh 30th, 2010, 2:51 PM - March 30th, 2015, 2:51 PM at a revitalization of gallery director Tif Sigfrids' former curatorial platform Tif's Desk. As a project the blog functioned on many levels, as a document of influences, a conduit in relationships IRL, a platform for exposure (of others and of self), and often as material for what's more traditionally understood as work. The archive is presented as a sculpture, the physical housing of more than 13,000 blog posts over the course of exactly five years. However what is sculpted is not its physical form to any discernible degree. Rather, what is sculpted is the immaterial: relationships, content, memory, and flows.

Joshua Abelow (b. 1976) received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1998 and his MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2008. Recent solo exhibitions include Good Morning at BFA Boats Fine Arts in São Paulo, Brazil and Running Wiches at Freddy in Harris, New York. A solo exhibition titled Freddy will simultaneously take place at James Fuentes, New York along with an exhibition titled Running Witches in Chelsea at a temporary space run by James Fuentes located at 132 10th Avenue, New York.