In his new work, James Esber continues to address notions of distortion, stereotyping, and perception. For this exhibition, his fifth one-person show in New York, Esber intentionally exploits a variety of media (plasticine, painting and work on paper) and a wide range of appropriated icons (from the flag raisers on Iwo Jima to Michael Jackson) to disrupt our preconceived notions of reality As Ken Johnson writes, “Like the paintings of Peter Saul and Philip Guston, these viscerally sensuous works plumb the polymorphously perverse depths of the American psyche.” (The New York Times)

Esber’s tendency is to use unnatural materials and unexpected juxtapositions to show how we perceive and portray things in distorted ways. Robert Storr describes Esber’s style of juxtaposition as a kind of “clunky elegance.”

...[B]oth the clunkiness and the elegance are the product of an imagination keyed to contradiction, and of a talent capable of calibrating the artifice to produce both effects with apparently natural unnaturalness. (Storr, 2006)

Related blog post: Edward Winkleman