Dusk Group
March 7 - April 20, 2025
March 7 - April 20, 2025
Basket Books & Art is pleased to present Joe Fyfe: Dusk Group, the artist’s first solo exhibition of artwork in Houston, Texas. The works that comprise Dusk Group extend a mode of inquiry designed to unsettle the stable propriety of painting and are reflective of Joe Fyfe’s restless commitment to refiguring medium-specific boundaries.
After twenty-five years of a practice that centered upon a conscious estrangement from any conventional approach to the making of paintings, in the interest of testing the limits of the painting form, Joe Fyfe found himself engaged in isolating the gesture as an element that plays with the conventions of openness and structure, improvisation and deliberation.
Fyfe begins by applying gestural brushstrokes onto scraps of castoff canvas from other works. He then affixes them to fresh, minimally colored, if not unmarked, sized canvas rectangles. Unlike conventional collages, which they resemble, he cuts holes of similar shapes into the canvas for them, making for a continuous plane.
On other works, Fyfe repurposes distressed industrial signage, which he has likened to the surface of traditional oil paintings. These are often applied on top of the support, utilizing the color of the canvas, continuing his nonrepresentational emphasis on the givens of physicality, support and color, and of allowing the intrinsic properties of the materials to dominate the compositions.
Joe Fyfe (b.1952, Staten Island, NY) was educated at the Philadelphia College of Art and immediately moved to New York upon graduating in 1977. His work was included in the historical exhibition The Times Square Show in 1980. He had his first show of imagistic, metaphorical figural paintings at Barbara Toll Fine Arts in NYC in 1983. Fyfe had exhibited internationally for four decades. He has shown in solo and group exhibitions at venues including Christian Lethert, Köln; Albert Baronian, Brussels; Acme, Los Angeles; Ceysson & Benetiere in Luxembourg and Geneva; Nathalie Karg and Cheim & Read in NY; and most recently at Peter Blum gallery in NY and Nordenhake gallery in Stockholm. His work has been awarded many prizes, including a Guggenheim, awards from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Artadia award, and several Pollock-Krasner and Adolph Gottleib awards. He also most recently received an award for art journalism from the Rabkin Foundation. In addition to his studio practice Fyfe is a Professor of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.
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Images: Alex Barber