Cancel the Band
April 5 - May 17, 2008
Jim Lutes, Hey, Kid, 1997-2008. Oil on aluminum. 54" X 84"
Jim Lutes is an unbelievably amazing artist. For those of us who have seen him in action - painting, teaching, being - he is strong, focused and completely unflappable. His fortitude both drives and enriches his paintings to an extent rarely experienced. For 30 plus years he has been making gritty, gentle, self-loathing and self-celebrating paintings. And while he himself is often celebrated in Chicago, the city within he works, Lutes is an all too often unfamiliar name in art circles in Los Angeles and New York. Kinkead Contemporary is ardently proud to present Jim Lutes' first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in nearly 20 years.
Lutes paints in a variety of media. Although, recently he seems to favor egg tempera over oil or acrylic. Egg tempera, a historical process and medium, which gives the paintings a depth and luminosity, is rarely utilized in contemporary art. However, Lutes' subject matter is quite au courant - skulls, dated technology, urban architecture and a good heap of self-reference. Truth be known, he's been making genre paintings of this nature long before the current throng similarlyminded artists even entered art school. Lutes' unique combination of gritty subject and lustrous style mirrors his uncanny ability to marry figurative painting and abstraction. At first glance, there appears to be a struggle between gesture and representation, however, according to Ezra Hoffman, the consistent layering of translucent pigment on top of the subject emphasizes "abstraction as a kind of representation."
In her essay for the 43rd Corcoran Biennial Judith Kirshner states "Lutes appreciates the timeless richness of masters such as Brueghel and Rubens, but at the same time he depends on his resistance to figurative impulse; his paintings neither repudiate nor invest in such heroic conventions. Rather, his work moves freely, layering oppositional concepts such as literal and abstract, visible and invisible."
Over the last 20 years, Jim Lutes has lived and worked in Chicago, where he has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1983. His many professional accomplishments include an impressive exhibition history at venues such as The Walker Art Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the National Academy Museum, New York. Lutes has also been included in the Whitney Biennial, Documenta and the Corcoran Biennial. Lutes work can be found in the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and The Phoenix Art Museum among others.