We love to know about artists and their pets. I think this is a collective imagination thing, where we sort of want to understand a personality through the animal an artist chooses to surround themselves with. Look, I am a cat and a dog person, so sometimes I can't even understand my own push and pull of animal preference. But an artist, the greats of our time, seem to have made the animal of their choice part of their practice, and dogs make a great companino in art history.
Julian Pace, and his Dog People show at The Bunker in LA, isn't just about artists and their dogs but about the mythical, almost mystic relationship we have with capital A Artists and their personal lives. Pace has always been a painter of understanding our relationship to imagery and personas, how we can understand the weight of someone's impact just on an image of them. He has tackled pop stars, sports icons, artists and cultural items, and here, by painting O'Keeffe, Hockney, Frida, Rivera and others (and himself) with dogs adds to a sort of myth of the person. What do we know about them and what does their pet of choice do to our understanding of the icon. In a simple series of works, we get so much of imagination here. —Evan Pricco
