Liam Everett: The Elephant Calf

Altman Siegel is pleased to present The Elephant Calf, Liam Everett’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. The Elephant Calf includes new paintings on linen completed in Everett’s indoor/outdoor studio in Sonoma County, 90 miles north of San Francisco. Here the artist has worked for the past year, developing and expanding his practice in which his primary concerns are questions regarding the act of painting itself. Borrowing the title from Bertolt Brecht’s The Elephant Calf, Everett mirrors concerns of the German playwright’s one-act prose, which in its 1926 debut functioned as an interlude or a play within a play. For his exhibition, Everett presents artworks wherein the viewer encounters numerous layers and arrangements within individual paintings. These complex configurations move the eye at different speeds across the canvas. Everett’s paintings do not attempt to narrate or define content, rather Everett allows for his heavily layered compositions to rise up out of what he calls the “original reality of the studio.” For Everett, this “reality” is an acknowledgement of his surrounding environment, and allows for him to consider his spatial and temporal conditions when building his paintings.

Bereft of any singular reference when starting a painting, Everett combs his workspace and immediate location, corralling together defunct tools and studio debris and placing these objects atop the linen, establishing a working reservoir for the “present-at-hand.” Soaking and staining the linen’s surface, these detritus act as props, offering direction in shaping mass and building up layers. These same concerns surfaced in Everett’s recent artist’s book Inutile, a publication of works on paper that evolved through his investigation of old tools and their movement across an antique block of watercolor paper. The publication serves as a precursor to the larger paintings on view and includes texts by art historian Bruno Tollon and writer Rabih Alameddine.

Everett utilizes color in the form of acrylic and enamel as a method for organizing and a means to hold shape and volume.  The artist is drawn specifically to the weight and mass color offers as well as the positive and negative capabilities of his materials. Everett commences each painting on heavy bound unstretched linen and builds large-scale, chromatic compositions by utilizing additive and subtractive processes. Everett considers the process of erasure not as a strike against painting, but as a viable and generative approach involving the continual re-adjustment of orientation and time. This combination of paint and various types of solvents becomes both meticulously planned and spontaneously executed, with infinite outcomes that are unique and impossible to replicate. Magnificent in their ability to envelope both viewers and the gallery, Everett’s paintings are elaborate endeavors, offering increasing detail the longer the viewer spends with the work.

Liam Everett (b.1973) lives and works in Sebastopol, California. He will be included in the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens' Biennale of Painting in Deurle, Belgium opening June 2016. Recent solo exhibitions include Office Baroque, Brussels; Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens; On Stellar Rays, New York; Paul Kasmin, New York and White Columns, New York. Recent group exhibitions include Arndt Fine Art, Singapore: the di Rosa, Napa; the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose; the Wattis Institute, San Francisco; White Columns, New York and Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna. Recent performances include Kadist, San Francisco; Liste 17, Basel and 179 Canal, New York. Everett’s editioned artist’s book Inutile was recently published by RITE Editions and is now part of the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Inutile is available for sale at the gallery.