This wild week of L.A. gallery openings started on Thursday with Anthony Lister at New Image Art in West Hollywood. Although I’ve always admired the movement Lister conjures up in his pieces–in his superhero series or his street faces–I had come to expect still figures in Lister’s work, and, because of that, I had no idea what to expect from a show focusing primarily on the figurative movement of dancers. What I found was impressive indeed.
Lister’s decision not to back or frame his canvases enhanced the gallery atmosphere considerably. Instead, they hung flat on the wall and had a textured, organic feel. Perhaps because of this, visitors were encouraged to touch some of the pieces, and more than a few visitors shuffled through the canvases that had been stacked on top of one another and affixed to the wall, giving a sense of a flip-book without the sequential art component.
The effect came off as straightforward and intimate, as modern in the best possible way, and this was aided by Lister’s humorous strings of sentences, penciled onto the white walls above, around, and even underneath the works. In one, he suggested that an immovable load-bearing girder be moved to better accommodate his work, and in another he provided guidance on how his art needed to be lit. Beneath his portrait of van Gogh, he wrote: “Id like to think van gogh wouldnt agree with making his work into a laurel if he had a say in it”. Continue reading “Anthony Lister at New Image”
