Joshua Abelow and Tom Evans at PAGE (NYC)

Artists: Joshua Abelow and Tom Evans

Venue: PAGE (NYC), New York, US

Date: November 11, 2017 – January 1, 2018

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Page, New York

PAGE (NYC) is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition by Joshua Abelow (b. 1976) and Tom Evans (b. 1943)—the second collaboration between the artists following Evans’ Eye and Mouth exhibition at Abelow’s gallery, Freddy, earlier this year. New work from Abelow and a painting from 1981 by Evans present a dialogue between artists who share formal and intellectual concerns despite different historical timelines. Originally recognized for process based abstractions, Evans made a drastic break in his work in the early 1980s, making a series of paintings called “Eye and Mouth” for only a few years. An example of these paintings titled Powerful Beings is exhibited in the gallery for the first time since its debut in the 1982 New Museum exhibition, New Work/New York. These pictures are “seething with gargoyles and other monstrous creatures with bulging eyes and serpentine tongues, muscular lips, and jack-o’-lantern teeth,” reflecting the fears and anxieties of our current moment. Abelow presents a new painting shown for the first time, similarly in a shift from recent figurations to strict constructions of staircases and checkerboards. A wall vinyl installation of Abelow’s signature running witch sprawls over the walls like a virus spreading from the computer-chip-like painting—an extension of his now-defunct ART BLOG ART BLOG, in which varying artists, like Evans, were instantly placed in conversation with Abelow’s own work. This calls attention to painting as an explicit social practice in the Internet age, wherein the multiplication of an image is the central material circuit between Abelow, Evans, and the viewer. The running witch becomes a symbol of this network, and the exhibition frames this relationship within the context of a physical exhibition.