Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce The Flirt, an exhibition of paintings by Los Angeles artist Joshua Petker. On view at 2660 S La Cienega Blvd, opening Saturday 1 May 2021. This is Petker's first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Petker's newest paintings are a reprieve from the past year of lockdowns and isolation, a portal to a romantic and psychedelic world of socialising, drinking, romance, music, and flirting. Constrained by a commitment to make essentially monochromatic paintings of blue, accented by punches of red, Petker provokes viewers with this electric combination. Blue is doleful, despondent, even risqué—as in blue humour, while red is passion, danger, and sensuality. The striking palette combination evokes advertising, discos, emergency and police lights.
The exhibition comprises large scale works which merge and layer a range of figurative styles. They are bold, buzzing crescendos populated by barmaids, dandies, and mustachioed flaneurs who float, converse, and recline together like mirages and apparitions. Petker also intersperses the exhibition with intimate tightly cropped paintings that court ambiguity and mystique. In these small works he pauses on quiet details suggestive of much larger scenes: red-stockinged feet sitting around after the party is over, a couple standing close in the garden, two hands fastening a slipper.
Drawing inspiration from historical paintings, which are intentionally kept anonymous, the works rely instead on their ability to evoke the familiar and uncanny, teasing and tantalizing. Rather than draw specific conclusions from these juxtapositions, the works in the exhibition unleash an exhilarating proliferation of meanings and pictorial puzzles. The artist offers the history of art and visual culture reshuffled—Picabia, Bronzino, soviet era cartoons. Petker makes these his own and the outcome is a timeless dreamlike mix of perspective and emotionality.
Joshua Petker (b. 1979, Los Angeles, CA) completed his MFA at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 2015 and his BFA at Evergreen State College in 2002. He has exhibited his work recently at La Loma Projects, Pasadena, CA; ASHES/ASHES, New York, NY; Park Life Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA; and ACME, Los Angeles, CA. Petker lives and works in Los Angeles.
Drawing inspiration from historical works, which are intentionally kept anonymous, Joshua Petker's paintings rely instead on their ability to evoke the familiar and uncanny, teasing and tantalising. Rather than draw specific conclusions from these juxtapositions, his work unleashes an exhilarating proliferation of meanings and pictorial puzzles. The artist offers the history of art and visual culture reshuffled—Picabia, Bronzino, soviet era cartoons. Petker makes these his own and the outcome is a timeless dreamlike mix of perspective and emotionality.
Anat Ebgi was founded in 2012 and has since grown to represent a wide array of established artists and emerging talents of international recognition with locations in Los Angeles on Wilshire Blvd. and New York City on a landmarked block in Tribeca. The gallery focuses on presenting an ambitious program of museum-caliber exhibitions and performances, such as our recent, expansive historical survey show commemorating the 50th anniversary of Womanhouse in Los Angeles. Our mission is to showcase artists from multiple generations and backgrounds to address diverse and historical perspectives within the broader context of contemporary culture including the global representation of pioneering eco-feminist artist Faith Wilding and the artist Estates of Tina Girouard and Gloria Klein.
Works by gallery artists are part of the collections of American museums including LACMA, MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, SFMOMA, MOCA Los Angeles, The Hammer, The Getty, Studio Museum in Harlem, ICA Miami, The Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Tufts University Art Galleries, Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Dallas Museum of Art, High Museum of Art, Speed Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Blanton Museum of Art, ICA Philadelphia, Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, and the Yale University Art Collection. And international museum collections including Rufino Tamayo Museum, Stedelijk Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, Moderna Museet, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, X Museum, Beijing, and K11 Art Foundation. The gallery has participated in such selected fairs as Art Basel, Switzerland, Miami Beach and Hong Kong; Frieze Los Angeles, London, and New York; The Armory Show; and The Art Show organised by the ADAA.
Anat Ebgi gallery joined the Art Dealer’s Association of America in 2023.
