Night Gallery Presents:
Marisa Takal | “Beyond Oy Too Scared to Ha-Ha”
OPENING RECEPTION
December 2, 2017 | 7pm – 10pm
EXHIBITION RUN
December 2, 2017 – January 13, 2018
NIGHT GALLERY
2276 East 16th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90021
Night Gallery is pleased to announce the return of artist Marisa Takal for their second solo exhibition of her work, beginning December 2. Takal is one of the brightest emerging painters in the art world. In 2016, she was named the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Award and the Stanley Hollander Award.
In “Beyond Oy Too Scared to Ha-Ha,” Takal creates abstract expressionist landscapes of places, times, interiors, intestines, disillusions, and emotions. She began work on the pieces of this exhibition during the inauguration earlier this year, and many of the pieces began from a place of anxiety. But as each painting evolved, they are transformed by a growing sense of levity—the “Ha-Ha” portion of the show’s title.
Keys, legends, scales and languages guide us through disquieting planes. Quivering colors carve inconsistent foregrounds and backgrounds. Scenes seen through the eyes, bootlegged in the brain, and then painted and painted and painted with both hands until it’s reached its conclusion. Tikal’s inconsistent hands mix modes of representation as she works against rules of color and design. She endeavors to work as unselfconsciously as possible—impulsively and without inhibitions as a means of finding the picture. The paintings become Rashomon narratives of meals eaten, car trips taken and neuroses entertained.
Relying on vulnerability, as skilled comedians do, Takal reveals a satire that always eventually gives way to sincerity. By experimenting with both prehistoric and modern painting tropes (roughly traced hands, political text), she allows sincerity and satire to oscillate like a joke setup that never quite reaches a punchline. Having commenced work for her inaugural show the same week as the presidential inauguration. Lively Elysian pastorals thus stand in subversive contrast to the frustration, anger, and sadness of the gestures that built them. Beyond Oy Too Scared to Ha-Ha is both a recognition of a world in crisis and a proposal of hopeful defiance.
Beyond Oy Too Scared to Ha-Ha will be on view at Night Gallery from December 2, 2017 through January 13, 2018. The opening reception will be held on December 2, 2017 from 7pm – 10pm. Night Gallery is located at 2276 East 16th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90021.
Gallery link: http://nightgallery.ca/event.php?id=231
