Anthony James - Fabulism
New York–May 11,2017: Fort Gansevoort is pleased to present Fabulism, the first New York solo projectin over a decade of British-born, Los Angeles-based artist Anthony James.The exhibition will stage a selection of older works mounted in dialogue with a new body of sculpturein an effort to reflect upon the dynamics of continuity and change within the artist’s practice.
The exhibition title speaks to the artist’s interest in elevating ordinary materials through experimentation and transformation. Fabulism, the literary theory of magical realism—which renders the mundane fantastical—is a preoccupation of the artist.The exhibition is curated by Lauri Firstenberg in collaboration with there-there, a new Los Angeles based production company and exhibition space.
James debuts his new series of Shields, rendered in steel and bronze,which are highly worked surfaces through a laborious process of painting and additive gestures of refined and subtlemetal work. James’s work operates elusively, staggering between the iconic and the arbitrary, the concrete and the alchemic, the mythical and experiential.
The artist reveals, "the works evoke pictorial depictions of thecosmos, alluding to notions of mysticism, ethereality, and science fiction, all the while anchored through the use of weighty, industrial materials such as metal and neon."The objects read as relics or artifacts from some liminal moment. As such, James attempts to locate beauty in the wake of insanity.