Neil Farber: Ursa Major

About

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is proud to present Ursa Major, a solo exhibition of work by Canadian artist Neil Farber in the gallery's new exhibition space in Heddon Street. Ursa Major debuts Neil Farber's new series of large paintings and drawings. Together, these works make up a poignant constellation of absurdist drama, echoing and amplifying the surreal qualities of the artist's work made with the highly regarded collective, The Royal Art Lodge. The viewer is invited on a visceral painted journey where mixtures of acrylic, pouring medium, ink and gloss gels create abstract configurations of Farber's trademark ‘heads', alongside pools of blood and phantasmatic landscapes. Farber's paintings and drawings are adorned with a sharp wit and darkly comic sensibility. His grand tableaux present a host of mythological and psychological creatures and caricatures from our contemporary political landscape. We are confronted by a cast of criminals, religious characters, and anonymous, anthropomorphic figures; often accompanied by automatic hand-written annotations that recall concrete and surrealist poetry. Farber's characters appear within humorous and dislocated stories that he articulates through a complex engagement with the possibilities of the white page or painting surface. His unconventional ‘broken' narratives emerge through a formal repetition akin to that of early minimalist works. For Farber, painting is over and beyond an act of representation. His ‘heads' bubble on the surface, gazing almost knowingly outwards and reminding the viewer of their luscious surface and objectivity. Neil Farber has recently exhibited at La Maison Rouge, Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Drawing Center, New York, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, the Arken Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark, Sies + Höke, Dusseldorf, Center for Contemporary Art, New Orleans, and Seoul Museum of Art, Korea. Farber's work is held in the collections of MoMA, New York, West Collection, Pennsylvania and Olbricht Collection, Essen and Berlin.