bob_knox

Bob Knox: NonFiction Paintings
October 28- December 14, 2003

Bob Knox: Non-Fiction Paintings, which was the New York-based artist’s first solo museum exhibition, featured 22 paintings created from 1995 to 2003. The imagery he paints is derived from photographs of home interiors found in design magazines dating from 1950s and 1960s, but he reveals a subtly, twisted reality. The rooms are rarely occupied, but leave evidence of their inhabitants an abandoned coffee cup, or a warm fire still burning and illuminating the space. For the viewer, it implies that the narrative was suddenly skewed or interrupted. Sardonic in tone, the interior spaces touch on our notions of taste and culture. In style, Knox positions himself as a mediator between painting and photography; he blurs the boundaries of representation and continuously transforms geometry. Seen from a distance, his canvases appear lushly illusory, but up close the soft-edged shapes lose representation so that the scene is barely recognizable. Ranging from brightly colored interiors to semi-abstract compositions of blurred lights against a night sky, his paintings toy with reality while maintaining strong ties to conventional realism.

Bob Knox: Non-Fiction Paintings was co-organized by the University Art Museum, and Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Terrie Sultan, Director, Blaffer Gallery, and Mary-Kay Lombino, former Curator of Exhibitions, University Art Museum, California State University Long Beach.

Image Credit: Bob Knox, White Quotations, 1999, acrylic on canvas, 34 x 29 in. Collection of Margaret Chapman and
Stanley Shenker.