Peter Blum is pleased to announce the exhibition Jason Fox: Eating Symbols, opening on January 12th at Peter Blum Chelsea, 526 West 29th Street, New York. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, January 12th, from 6 to 8 p.m. This will be Jason Fox’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

For this exhibition, Jason Fox will present paintings, drawings, and a sculpture that bridge together previous bodies of work. As suggested by the exhibition title, Fox plays with a wide range of influences from Abstract Expressionism via the celebrity portraits of Warhol to Cave painting born from A.R. Penck’s timeless alphabet. The paintings create a dialogue between pop culture, religious icons, and abstraction. All the work shares an interest in transparency, and symbols caught in various states of transformation between abstraction and figuration.

The paintings can be loosely grouped into three series. In the first layers of water saturated color and pencil form portraits including Beatles, Saints, and false idols. The red paintings layer expressionistic observed portraits of the family dog with pencil messages from the outside world. The third group of paintings deploys a Malevich tilt to create a series consisting of flags, monuments, mountains, lakes, and views from a tomb.

The drawings provide both an editorial conscience nostalgic of old New Yorker cartoons and Olyphant and reveal experiments with psychedelia and popish expressionistic portraiture that clearly bleed into the works on canvas. The idea of layering images based on familiarity rather than discordance is first articulated in the drawings where trees meet aliens and dungeons are galleries.

One sculpture made of a carved tree, drop cloth plastic, and a metal base stands alone. …part stick figure, part cross, part scarecrow for an interzone filled with aluminum foil posing as lightning, Ringo visiting Picasso, and color dissolving ideologies.

Jason Fox was born in 1964 in Yonkers, New York. He currently lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York. Fox received a B.F.A. from Cooper Union, New York and a M.F.A from Columbia University, New York. National and international solo exhibitions include shows at Feature Inc., New York; Mario Diacono at Ars Libri, Boston; Greener Pastures Contemporary Art, Toronto, Canada; and at the Museo de Arte Carillo Gil, Mexico City. Past group shows include Every Revolution is a Roll of Dice organized by Bob Nickas at Paula Cooper Gallery and at the Ballroom Marfa, Texas; That is Then…This is Now and Greater New York at P.S.1, New York; and Drunk vs. Stoned at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise.