Josh Dihle

Yellow Humid Picture Night

March 16 - April 13, 2013

Opening Reception: Saturday, March 16, 6-9pm

Artist Discussion: 8pm on the night of the opening

Open Hours: Saturdays 2-5pm

Autumn Space is pleased to present Yellow Humid Picture Night, an exhibition of paintings by Josh Dihle.

In his first solo exhibition in Chicago, Dihle uses varied approaches to working with wood and paint to create a complex and emotive patchwork of paintings. Though each is an independent artwork, the paintings in Yellow Humid Picture Night together suggest narratives that uncurl across the gallery walls, as though the pictures are possessed of a single consciousness. Both abstract and representational, these works are alternately tense and sensuous, and together they offer overlapping accounts of anxiety and desire.

In one work, entitled Chief of Burials, Dihle has incised a mixed tropical-suburban landscape into a solid plane of wood, and then carved holes into it to accommodate stones, fossils, and his own teeth. The carved surface, with its embedded ornaments, resists the illusion of the miniature landscape. The uneasy pairing of surface and image allows for a more intuitive visual logic. This way of working has resulted in a type of painting that rigorously questions its own status, but which nevertheless embraces the direct pleasures of the creative act.

The exhibition will be accompanied by the release of a limited edition artist’s book.

Josh Dihle was born in Rockville, Maryland in 1984. He earned his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his BA from Middlebury College. His work has recently been shown in exhibitions in New York, Miami Beach, Austin, and Washington D.C., and will be shown at the University of Maine Museum of Art in 2014.

Open Hours: Saturdays 2-5pm for the extent of the exhibition