Altman Siegel is pleased to present an exhibition of five new wall works by Garth Weiser.

Weiser’s third solo exhibition with the gallery galvanizes several significant aesthetic breakthroughs that have recently emerged within the artist’s ever-evolving practice. These newest works represent perhaps the richest coalescence of complex patterning and layering yet seen in the artist’s expansive pictorial vocabulary. Imbedded with ghost layers of representational information, Weiser’s exhibited works fuse pictorial mirages with surface materiality, pattern-precision with impasto-like textural expressivity, and digital design concerns with traditional painting applications.

In addition to selective cross-referentiality and formal consistency, the tightly considered arrangement of exhibited works at Altman Siegel is unified through a subtly permeating dystopic or entropic energy, eliciting a push/pull between chaos and order in which neither accepts subsumption into the other. Rather than being puzzled together or sutured like traditional collage, it is the case in some of the displayed works that the printed 2-dimensional imagery is essentially one singular and seamless photographic capture applied onto a heavily textured and patterned painted surface and obscured further through subtractive gashes and burnishing. In other cases, the primary photographic and graphic information represents a collapsing of multiple sources. In all cases the illusions within the printed imagery are forever tied to the realities of the painted objects. Among the printed material in the displayed works are recurring shots of a small Weiser abstract pinned to a wall, an over-exposed or otherwise intentionally faded gathering of three uniformed chefs, graphics from a calendar wryly indicating the year “2023”, brick walls, an aerial view of combat troops in a formation that resembles an owl, and the appropriated phrase “All Dreams Gone Forever RIP.”

The resulting compositions are each synthesized as “whole” singular works, yet they reverberate with the energy of layers that refuse to completely amalgamate. In many ways these newest iterations profess a certain dissidence. The types and traces of mark-making in Weiser’s recent investigations oscillate between effects in conversation with expressive painting, pattern painting, mosaic, collage, screenprint registration, and digital pixelation. Each elusive image is achieved through a unique process of paint-layering, textural paint build-up, UV cured ink-jet printing, masking, and razoring away at the topography of the surface. The modeled dimensionality results in endlessly shifting perception possibilities, depending on viewing angles and shadows cast by undulating rows of surface peaks and valleys.

Weiser’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Altman Siegel, San Francisco, CA; Simon Lee Gallery, London, UK and Hong Kong; Casey Kaplan, New York, NY; The Contemporary, Austin, TX; and Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL. Group exhibitions include the Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, CA; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Saatchi Gallery, London, UK; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; and MoMA PS1, New York, NY.

For more information, please contact Altman Siegel at info@altmansiegel.com or 415-576-9300.

Altman Siegel