WLAC Exhibition
November 7, 2019 – January 23, 2020
Steven Hull was born in Lakewood, California in 1967. He received his B.F.A and M.F.A from the California Institute of the Arts; the latter in 1997. He lives and works in Los Angeles and has exhibited at Rosamund Felsen Gallery since 1998. He has also shown at Galeries Schmidt MacZollek and Rolf Ricke in Koln, Germany and been included in group exhibitions at the Neues Museum in Nuremberg, Germany. He organized Las Cienegas Projects in Los Angeles, a collaborative artists and writers space and workshop, 2009-2011.
Hull has compiled and edited numerous artist publications including Blind Date (1998), a catalogue of 31 artists and writers’ collaborations; I’m Still In Love With You (1998-99), an album and catalogue in which visual artists and writers respond to the 1972 album by Al Green; Song Poems (2000-01), a catalogue with 3 CDs of 43 original lyrics, songs and album art contributed by numerous writers, artists and musicians; and Nothing Moments (2007), a publishing and curatorial project consisting of 24 limited edition books and over 400 original drawings. He is a recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for painting.
Datebook: L.A. artist Steven Hull’s three-part show draws carnivals and seafaring
New shows around Los Angeles include one inspired by carnivals and exhibitions that draw from the African American experience...
Steven Hull, “Our Little Chapel by the Lake — The Transformation of Jesus Christ,” at Meliksetian Briggs.In his second solo installation at the gallery, Hull is presenting a three-part exhibition that includes a show of abstract paintings with a kinetic sculpture, figurative paintings and sculpture and a record release and performance (the latter of which will close out the show). The show continues to explore the themes — such as seafaring and the carnivalesque — for which Hull is well known...
Review: A Klansman with a megaphone: Steven Hull’s sordid art laments troubled times
Steven Hull makes carnivalesque hybrids of painting and sculpture whose chief aim is to turn visions of the conventional world upside down. When that world has already been stood on its head, his art assumes an unexpected level of creepiness.
The centerpiece of his incisive show at Meliksetian Briggs, Hull’s debut with the gallery, puts white nationalism and its perversion of authentic Christian values on sordid display. An assemblage of ramshackle found objects, it features an old-fashioned motorized scooter — a vintage 1951 Electric Shopper — towing a model battleship that’s made from wood blocks, packing tubes and old sardine and tuna fish cans, all painted dull gray.
by Kristen Osborne-Bartucca
Like a modern-day Ishmael, Steven Hull spent the last few years sailing and seeing the watery part of the world. Hull’s enthusiasm for his new hobby unmistakably influenced his current exhibition of painting, sculpture and sound installation at Rosamund Felsen. The nautical and the carnivalesque, two fitting bedfellows in their evocative and lonely surrealism, dialogue with each other in Hull’s work; he contrasts the sense of adventure and whimsy commonly associated with both milieus with the melancholy and anonymity that are perhaps even more pervasive.
...
by Christopher Knight
New paintings, sculptures and a group of compelling drawings by Steven Hull are eccentric evocations of the risks, rewards and penalties of going out beyond one’s usual limits.
For his 11th solo show at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Hull goes out to sea. Anchored by sculptures of a sailboat and battleships loosely reminiscent of Chris Burden’s work, the show also features paintings and drawings on carnival themes. They recall early Modernist images of life as a tragicomic circus of love and loss, stylish dignity struggling with inelegant humiliation.
...
by Jody Zellen
Steven Hull has fun making art. His works are playful installations with miniature steam engines and marionettes. Fans spin and colorful panels are stacked against the wall. The abstract and representational, real and imagined mingle within room-sized installations. He uses the walls as framing devices and allows his “paint- ings” to extend into the space so that they become sculptures and paintings simultaneously. While the narrative thread through the work may be obtuse, it is clear that Hull’s placement is not arbitrary; he is interested in how the parts add up to create the whole. In this installation he has collaborated with the Bob Baker Marionette Theater, bringing puppets into the mix in order to add another layer of interactivity to the work.
by Eve Wood
The inside of Steven Hull’s brain could be likened to a flowering tree in constant bloom. His newest effort, “Balcony,” is an exploration into the various ways that meaning is extrapolated from any artwork, or for that matter any “thing” in the living known world. Hull’s sculptural installations are riotously inventive and seemingly hell-bent on exploding open any preconceived ideas we might have as to what art is capable of in its purest form. Works like the enigmatic, and strangely menacing “Grandma” has a shamanistic appeal, though this grandma could also have sprung fully formed from the mind of Stephen King, standing on green stairs in front of a glowing pink disk and holding a wayward eyeball. My, my, Grandma what big eyes you have indeed!
by Eve Wood
For decades Steven Hull's work has been marked by a riotous comic sensibility, as though life itself were a meditation on the absurd; yet beneath the exacting wit and garish colors, one can clearly discern a passionate and committed mind at work. Hull has long been a "multi-faceted practitioner and curatorial figure" on the Los Angeles art scene and has been exhibiting at Rosamund Felsen since 1998. His projects are diverse and far-reaching and include long-term collaborations with other artists, musicians and writers, his own practice as an artist seemingly intensified by his interest in and support of other artist's efforts. In 2010, Hull co-founded Las Cienegas Projects with a curatorial program that focuses mostly on more esoteric work and community participation.
...
