ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

JULIAN HOEBER
September 6 – October 20, 2012
Opening reception: Thursday September 6, 6 – 8 pm

Harris Lieberman is pleased to present Los Angeles-based artist Julian Hoeber’s first solo exhibition in New York. Hoeber works in a variety of media- sculpture, painting, drawing, photography and installation- to produce an intuitive balance between emotion and rationality. Hoeber uses art history as a structure and establishes sets of rules for working, but creates new narratives by destroying, sometimes violently, the framework he created.

The centerpiece of the exhibition will be DH#2, a free-standing structure based on the architecture of “gravitational mystery spots”, a kind of American roadside attraction. Mystery spots usually lay claim to being sites of supernatural power or geological anomaly to explain a severe effect of disorientation and vertigo for the visitor, when in truth these effects are the result of an architectural trick. Hoeber’s version uses the same crooked structure as the roadside attraction, but reveals the device behind the hoax, while never diminishing the effect. DH#2 is a variation on Demon Hill, Hoeber’s outdoor sculpture made for the Hammer Museum in 2010.

Hoeber will also exhibit a new group of paintings, low-relief wall works, and furniture that engage this game of illusion and connect Hoeber’s interest in architecture and design to his recent painting series Execution Changes. The abstraction seen in earlier paintings now moves towards optical illusion and architectonics. These works share in the phenomenological effect of DH#2 and open up the possibility for emotion and narrative.

Julian Hoeber (b. 1974) earned a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and a MFA from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. He has exhibited widely including solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Blum and Poe, Los Angeles; and Praz-Delavallade, Paris; and his work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Santa Monica Museum of Art; Today Art Museum, Beijing; Luckman Gallery at California State University, Los Angeles; and the Rubell Family Collection, Miami.