Anat Ebgi is pleased to present new paintings by Los Angeles artist Joshua Petker. The exhibition, entitled Hyacinth Canyon, is the artists’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, September 13, 6-8 pm.
Hyacinth Canyon names both myth and place. Taking inspiration from the Greek story of beauty, rivalry, and metamorphosis, Petker pairs it with a fanciful California canyon where time folds on itself. The convergence of history and imagination unites Petker’s practice, which treats painting as a site of overlapping realities. Across large and medium scale canvases, layered and interlocking figures share a frame, yet retain a charged, separate relationship to each other. Ghostlike impressions, statuesque nudes, and wandering outlines of beasts and smiles seem at once animated and permanently fixed, arrested by a skin of paint. Here Petker treats the present tense as composite: histories, jokes, and devotions convene as a simultaneous multi-subjective reality.
Simultaneity registers as a metaphor for our times. Courtly decorum and comic interruption share the same picture plane. Identity and archetype behave like collage, as convergent stacks of roles that never settle into singularity. Desire and discipline move as mutually dependent currents through these avatars of contemporary ascension. Whether in a grand promenade portrait or a crowded tavern of layered subjects, the painted surface operates like a proscenium, where allegory, memory, and revision overlap rather than resolve.
Petker’s chromatically intense palette is a structuring device, setting the order of attention. Ice blue, burning orange, and punctuating cadmiums direct the eye rhythmically across the canvas. Suggesting a sort of anarchic freedom, limbs and costumes splice, silhouettes echo and contradict, outlines double back, tracing a choreography of alternate poses and time scales. Varying expressions of line, color, and rendering sit together; revisions, rubbings, and drips remain legible throughout. Petker’s subjects command this bizarre, yet curiously credible and fertile world of the imagination and subconscious.
Forming a lush, theatrical world where anachronism and allegory collide, Petker mines a visual vocabulary of 18th- and 19th-century European painting. Courtly attire, powdered wigs, pastoral landscapes, and studio tableaux, are filtered through a Petker’s psychedelic lens producing figures who are at once historical, haunted, and disassembled. Goblets, masks, laurels, tambourines, dogs, and dragons alike, circulate as props in a repertory theater. Their recurrence turns iconography into a grammar of morphability. Process and development, rehearsal and performance, period styles and studio cartoons, water nymph and flower child, share the stage to complete a vision of reality. Petker reanimates art history as a medium of fantasy, introspection, and archetype, reimagining historical motifs and genre toward an emotional truth.
