Doug Jeck: "Early Works"

Klemens Gasser and Tanja Grunert are pleased to present “Early Works”, the first solo exhibition of Doug Jeck at Gasser Grunert gallery.

Doug Jeck is a Seattle, Washington based artist whose sculptures are influenced by static physicality and historicity, with the human object at the center. His life-like sculptures are an amalgamation of clay, hair, concrete, fur and wood that explore Jeck’s perception of various early historical periods and figures.

In “Early Works” Doug Jeck renders fictional and historical icons into mummified relics preserved thousands of years later. Jeck creates a contest of realism, placing canonical “Cleopatra” next to biblical “Goliath”, bringing these fantasies to our immediate reality. By creating a tactile specimen, Jeck composes a definitive truth to the shifting lens of the past; a negotiation between one’s fictions and non-fiction.

“Goliath” the nine foot, Philistinean giant is dressed for combat disarmed by time, towers in stasis. The battle scarred detail of “Goliath” with the infamous sling shot stone buried deep in his forehead slowly shifts into crumbly human rawhide reducing the persona of “Goliath” into a mere object.

Doug Jeck engages with subject and materials that are weathered by time to blur the delineation between history and myth. He is constantly at odds with “Realism” because of his inability to produce authentic specimens, artifacts or icons, except, maybe by default.

Doug Jeck was born in 1963 and grew up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He is the Chair of Ceramic Art and an Associate Professor at the University of Washington. Jeck currently lives and works in Seattle, Washington.