The Shooting Gallery‘s have a solo show from Hush planned for next month. Hush is a skilled designer who can paint some very beautiful canvases. Maybe the content isn’t groundbreaking (not much art is), and isn’t the sort of thing that I am looking to hang on my walls, but I’m not about to dis Hush or the people who like collect his art. After all, it’s very-well executed and nice to look at. Should be cool to see his new direction. Plus, his stenciled geisha at the first Cans Festival was one of the highlights of the free-for-all stencil area.
The Shooting Gallery says:
The Shooting Gallery is proud to present Passing Through: New works by Hush. This exhibit honors the empowered modern women while celebrating the creative expression of street art. Please join us for the opening reception on Saturday, May 1st 2010, from 7-11 pm.
Hush uses a collision of Eastern and Western imagery to celebrate the modern woman. His manga inspired female forms speak of the strength and power that present day women own, confronting the viewer with a contemporary take on traditional figure painting. These anime women overlay a graffiti style background that references Western imagery in appreciation of cross-cultural influences of Asian culture and Western values.
Passing Through is a darker body of work visiting the concept of life and death.This progression on the part of Hush reveals deeper, more mature paintings. Following in suit with themes of the ephemeral, these works are inspired by Hush’s frequent travels and the graffiti he documents along the way. Each transient mark is evidence of one action and one creative expression, despite its gradual degradation over time.
Hush has developed a process of layering and defacing his canvases to mimic years of tags and wheat paste on a city wall. To begin, Hush covers the canvas with paint, graffiti tags, and collaged photocopies from graphic novels and old comics. He then uses blown up hand drawings of manga girls and screen prints them onto the canvas, embracing the medium’s imperfections by masking off specific parts to be hand painted in later. Hush paints and tags between screens to achieve a complex multilayered texture, defacing the work to reference the weathered, transient quality of street art.
Hush lives and works in the United Kingdom where he has shown extensively with Urban Angel (London) and Opus Art (London and Newcastle). His international repertoire extends to Scope Miami, Art Basel Switzerland, Fifty24SF Gallery (San Francisco), and Carmichael Gallery (Los Angeles).
Please join us for the opening reception of Passing Through: New Works by Hush on Saturday, May 1st, 2010, from 7-11pm. The exhibit will be on view through June 5th, 2010, and is open to the public.
Hush has also made a screenprint for this show. Looking West (above) is a 4 color screenprint on top of a giclee and has been printed as an edition of 50. It’s might be available for pre-order now at The Shooting Gallery for $400.
