The Merry Karnowsky Gallery presents D I S E A S E D, Paintings by James Marshall

Merry Karnowsky Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by James Marshall, formerly known as Dalek. Born in 1968, the Brooklyn-based painter has made a reputation with a distinctive and innovative style, unlike any other Pop-Inspired painter working today. Stylistically synthesizing the American traditions of still animation and cartoons, his remarkably complex compositions resemble a direct lineage to the expressive Japanese Superflat movement, and the zany everyday apparitions found in nature.

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20070803/LAF060)

Marshall logically constructs narratives in all-over relationships whose internal visual order creates its own story. More than complex, all-over patterning, Marshall strives to evoke subtle and abstract personal statements, which are often enigmatic. Taking visual cues from both historic and personal origins, these compositions take color and line into undiscovered territory. His paintings on wood panel layer dioptric fragments of an imagined world, against a fractured kaleidoscope of the real world. Slick and unblemished, these hybrid works balance the artist's pictoral impulses with near mechanical decorum, as they venture into the realm of feeling and lived experience.

In Diseased, Marshall moves away from the austere single figuration of the past, and focuses instead on hyper-filled landscapes that pluralize the macrocosmic. Just as complexity theory uses multi-dynamic spaces as formulas for the realms of the instant, Marshall's 'Nuevo-Rococo' configurations challenge the notions of the interior / exterior, macro / micro, and its conflicts or acquiescence to the world. The simultaneity of such complex imagery, beautifully rendered, creates the power to mesmerize and enchant the viewer.

Merry Karnowsky Gallery
170 S. La Brea
(IN the ART 170 Building)
Los Angeles, CA 90036
323.933.4408