| Yuval Pudik, Tears No. 63 (Patsy Cline, I Cried All the Way to the Altar), 2015, 14 x 22 inches, 35.6 x 55.9 cm |
Gavlak Los Angeles proudly presents Old Fires Were Burning, a solo exhibition of new work by artist Yuval Pudik. Keeping in mind a history of painting traditions and installation sensibilities, Pudik explores what it means to make “works on paper” in five new bodies of work weighted by the gravity of history and the sensitive observation of human interaction.
Pudik begins with the triangle and it’s geometric/symbolic simplicity, but uses the shape to point to a much more complex system of meanings. Pudik’s group of works entitled Tears (2014-15) is informed by three specific cultural references. In the Israeli occupied territories of West Bank and Gaza, identification checkpoints are protected by intimidating cement blocks marked with a single triangle. In the nautical flag system the triangle is used by ships to indicate “man overboard” when communicating between vessels. Perhaps one of the most iconic uses is the pink triangle imposed by the Nazi regime during the holocaust to identify homosexual individuals sent into concentration camps. With these three references in mind, Pudik uses the meaning of the triangle to allude to the victimization of humans, be it by forced aggression or the erasure of identity. This body of work maintains the paper as a delicate work surface while “forcing” spray paint (air-born, messy, imperfection) to “behave” in dialog with the graphite (human, metal, based in touch, precise). Pudik produces clean, almost machinelike straight lines and geometries – an orderly result out of two disorderly materials.
In The Grants of 69 Washington: Lost Girls (2015), Pudik creates ten photographically precise drawings of images captured from gymnasts’ ribbon routines. The trace of the objects in time (originally photographed) leave an impression in space and are recaptured in a drawing. Frozen movement is also explored In Mother’s Only Son: Ambidextrous (2015), an installation of two framed large-scale drawings depicting figurative wings and non-representational abstract forms. Suspended in space the drawings insinuate tension between flight and gravity by hinging the works off the wall.
Los Angeles-based artist Yuval Pudik was born in Israel in 1978 and studied at The College of Technology and Art in Tel Aviv. His work has been shown at Yvonne Lambert, New York; Angles Gallery, Culver City; ACME Gallery, Los Angeles; The Long Beach Museum of Art; Silverman Gallery, San Francisco; and Gavlak Palm Beach, among other venues.
-Lisa Jaye Young