MARTY WALKER GALLERY PRESENTS:

DION JOHNSON
NEW PAINTINGS

VIDEO ROOM: BRIAN FRIDGE

OCTOBER 15 -NOVEMBER 12, 2011 / Opening: Saturday, October 15, 6-8pm

Dion Johnson Glider, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 100 in.

Marty Walker Gallery is pleased to present large-scale, color-field abstract paintings of Los Angeles-based artist Dion Johnson. Bringing California hard edge painting into the new millennium, Johnson combines flat planes of bold commercial colors, creating shifting fields that recall paintings of Karl Benjamin and John McLaughlin.

The strata of color inspired by LA’s overabundant billboards, architecture and buzzing traffic transforms the congested urban culture into simplified synthetic cityscape of vivid clarity. Johnson, like McLaughlin, explores the movement between the planes of color, like subtle pauses that linger in musical compositions, setting the colors to pulsate between thin stripes and expanding wide slabs, flat space and unexplored depths. While Johnson’s interest is rooted in landscape and environment, his paintings lack any representational forms to evoke an openness recalling an almost utopian eternal Southern California summer – light, rich, and abundant.

Johnson lives and works in Los Angeles, received his BA from the Ohio State University and an MA from Claremont University. Johnson has exhibited nationally in museums and galleries from New York, Los Angeles, Santa Fe, and Columbus, Ohio.

Brian Fridge, Sequence 36.2, 2010
black and white, silent video, duration: 2:02

VIDEO ROOM: BRIAN FRIDGE

In his first exhibition at the gallery, Dallas artist Brian Fridge merges sculpture in a virtual realm with video, inspired by Malevich, theories in physics, Belgian artist Panamarenko’s flying machines, and Arte Povera’s celebration of endless change, process, and the flow of energy. For this exhibition, the artist will share Sequence 36.2 which begins with a tiny mandala-like form appearing to morph into simultaneously a plant-like object vacillating between growth and inky plumes. His constructed scenes suspend time and recognition, and when combined with camera recordings of magnetic phenomena such scenes become shifting, dimensional abstractions.