Chad Attie: Contempt Closing Reception

Klowden Mann is very pleased to present our first solo show by Los Angeles-based artist Chad
Attie, Contempt. The exhibition features collage works presented on paper, canvas and light
box, exploring themes of idealized love, alienation, mythologized beauty, and loss of innocence
through the use of found imagery of figure and landscape. The exhibition will be on view from
December 14th through January 25th, with an artist talk on Saturday, January 11th, at 4pm,
and a closing reception for the artist on Saturday, January 25th, from 6-8pm.
In Contempt, Attie uses a variety of found materials that speak to our investment in (potentially
false) ideals, and in the objects we create to represent those ideals. Vintage paintings
purchased at garage sales, imagery from cinema (the title Contempt is in homage to Jean-Luc
Godard’s film of the same name), children’s book illustrations, fabric, and needlepoint all
become fodder for re-examination, as Attie layers his imagery and then tears it away to reveal
what lies beneath (which is more surface, more idealized representation). Attie’s found
representational objects themselves have been vested with hope—of reconciliation and
wholeness through love, of childhood imaginings, of land that has not yet been overrun with
industrialization. Attie’s manipulation and composition of those objects acts to invest new hope
through dialogue, while simultaneously ripping apart the very ideals to which they speak.
Presenting the moment of recognition as taking place exactly where the ideal meets its own
impossibility, Attie continually focuses in on the destructive potential of desire to override all
other modes of seeing and being. In the surfaces of Attie’s works, he shows us the
unconquerable distance between subject and object, and the struggle to find agency while an
idealistic hope for unity still maintains narrative power.
Chad Attie was born in Los Angeles, and studied at UCLA and Boston University. He has
exhibited at venues including Caro d’Offay in Chicago, Read Contemporary Art in Dallas,
Andrew Shire Gallery, Frank Pictures, Carl Berg Projects and Newspace in Los Angeles, and
Wooster Projects in New York. He lives and works in Los Angeles.