Dike Blair - Drinks

72 pages
Edited by Dike Blair
Text(s) by Luis Buñuel
30.5 x 23 cm 
Language: English
Hardback 
Publisher: Revolver Publishing
2016

Dike Blair finds the subjects for his pictures by taking a careful look at fixtures of the world around him, focusing on details that are often hardly arresting. His repertoire of motifs is not limited to architectural elements, but he has deliberately kept it limited, employing repetition as a conceptual strategy. In addition to the architectural depictions, recurrent motifs in his oeuvre include still lives often of cocktails and arrangements that suggest the interior of a bar as well as landscapes, flowers and women eyes.

In his exhibition at the Secession, Dike Blair presents around fifty paintings. Most date from the years between 2010 and 2015, and with few exceptions, they depict the motifs listed in the prosaic title of his show. Three sculptures the American artist designed for the exhibition are arrangements of the titular four elements (floor, door, window, wall) but were also a response to the fact that his exhibition occupies four rooms. (In a fourth small room with no sculpture he shows small paintings of drinks and ashtrays, the subjects of his artist's book.) 

He conceived of the sculptures after an earlier visit to the Secession, hoping to generate an interesting circulation pattern to view the paintings. He also likes the paradox of illusionistic representation vs. concrete abstraction. Unlike Blair's pictures, which always operate within the representational register, his sculptures transform concrete objects such as a (freestanding) wall, a windowpane, a door leaf, and flooring materials into abstract compositions. The paintings, which show one of the four elements in isolation, are grouped by motifs, while the sculptures unite all four in a larger whole.

Artist's book published on the occasion of the exhibition at the Secession, Vienna, Austria (12.02. - 03.04.2016).