Louis B. James is pleased to present Push Came to Shove, Matthew Kirk’s first solo exhibition in New York. The show is comprised of large and small-scale works on paper, as well as abstract sculpture made from humble materials such as bicycle tubing and construction debris. The work on view casts a sly eye on the artist’s American Indian heritage, picking up and casting off tropes of a highly charged and often mined visual and material culture.

Kirk’s drawings, done in gouache, chalk, pencil, and ink, depict a dimly turbulent fantasy world fusing the artist’s Navajo origins with contemporary experience. Mixing quick, gestural abstraction with cartoonish figuration, Kirk creates urgent, vivid scenes of pictorial violence with architectural and spiritual vignettes.

His sculpture, also on view, reflects the humility and integrity of discarded domestic and construction material. His hand is slight, enacting subtly elegant transformations on bicycle tubing, found wood, pegboard, fine art crates, and metal fencing.

Matthew Kirk (b. 1978, Ganada, AZ) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His work has been shown at Exit Art, New York; Pr1mary Space Gallery, Michigan; and others. In 2010 he was nominated for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation grant.

Louis B. James is located at 143b Orchard St, New York. The gallery is open from Wednesday through Saturday from 11 to 6 and Sunday from 12 to 6. For more information please email [email protected] or call (212) 533-4670.