23 October – 23 December, 1997
Exhibition
The Spencer Brownstone Gallery is pleased to announce New Blue Chip Paintings, an exhibition of recent paintings by 29 year old Phil Bower. Bower is a Los Angeles based artist who had his debut solo exhibition at the gallery last year.
In his previous New York exhibition, Bower turned to forensics and taxidermy to resolve the subject / object relationship in painting. Olivia Sand of Artis writes that "Even if death is omnipresent in the paintings, it does not seem submitting, macabre or scary. Bower wants his pictures to be understood as an expression of our mortality and death as our ever-present companion."
In his current work, Bower anthropomorphizes color. Through his vocabulary of cuts, bruises, bullet holes, mouths, stitches and forensic tags, the transcendence traditionally associated with colorfields is displaced by the random disfigurement of the everyday. His scars are enigmatic emblems, accidental yet deliberate, existing in worlds of immutable color. Bower acknowledges two visions of reality, visceral and ethereal.
Artist Bio
Phil Bower studied painting at the University of Southern California, where he received his M.F.A. His two years at Gemini GEL provided him with a highly specialized situation where he studied directly with artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly, Claes Oldenburg and Ed Kienholz.