Steven Hull
For his 11th solo exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Steven Hull’s presentation is part seaside carnival, part ocean voyage. Although this exhibition is mainly focused around large scale abstract and figurative paintings, sound is also very crucial to the viewers’ experience. The show also includes a number of large scale wood sculptures and oil paint transfers. As seen in previous exhibitions by the artist, the sculptures address the paintings combining themselves into captivating tableaus creating new dialogues and conversations.
Hull is established as an engaged and multi-faceted artistic and curatorial practitioner. His diverse interests and methods have led him to undertake a varied range of projects, which at times have included long-term collaborative efforts with other artists, musicians, and writers resulting in ambitious traveling shows and exhibition catalogues. These efforts are further exemplified by the Los Angeles artist-run non-profit space founded by Hull, Las Cienegas Projects, which has a curatorial program emphasizing experimentation and communal involvement. This dynamic approach and stylistic diversity come through in Hull’s latest body of work. The artist continues to explore the various ways that painting and sculpture overlap, where a flat image may appear to be dimensional, and a sculptural piece can feel image-based. By extension, we are led to consider the ways in which our notions of these delineations are contingent, where received logic can be broken down by simple contextual shifts.
Steven Hull received his BFA and MFA from California Institute of the Arts, the latter in 1997. In addition to having exhibited in the U.S. and internationally, he has organized numerous publications and exhibitions 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. Hull lives and works in Los Angeles.
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.
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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.
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