Galerie Eva Presenhuber is pleased to present the second solo show of American artist Alex Hubbard entitled ‘Urethane Paintings’.
‘Urethane Paintings’ is a presentation of fifteen works created by casting traditional paintings and using casting materials on traditional stretchers. These cast and poured paintings become lenses through which the gallery space as well as the other paintings in the exhibition can be viewed. Simultaneously, they also act as film stills testament to their own creation.
The works vary from beer bottle brown amber to melted plastic purples and blacks. The paintings act as projections against the gallery white, as ushers between spaces, and as portholes to outside space. Hubbard has long been an artist whose praxis intertwines the different roles of the artist, making films as a painter and paintings as a sculptor. It is in this new series that he manages to fully display his vision of space and architecture and forces us to enter this reflexion through a labyrinth of colours and textures, of light filtered through screens. Thus the paintings create their own space surrounding them. The stretchers are a mise en abyme of their own motifs when placed in front of windows which reproduce a similar structure. In this new series of work, one cannot help but sensing Hubbard’s humour, as if he had decided to take on our popular vision of painting as a window into a world, a world of his own he has decided to create.
Alex Hubbard has had solo exhibitions at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, MA, USA 2014, at the Hammer Museum, CA, USA, 2012, Kunsthalle Berlin, DE, 2010, Centre for Contemporary Visual Art, Toronto/ON, Canada, 2010 and The Kitchen, New York/NY, USA.
