Installation view
David Lloyd
Altered Artforum
September 10 - October 15, 2016
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 10th, 6-8pm
Klowden Mann is very pleased to present Altered Artforum a special exhibition of work by David Lloyd, featuring 15 works on paper which take recent Artforum covers as the starting point for a mixed-media one-way collaboration between Lloyd and the artists featured on the covers. The exhibition will be on view from September 10th through October 15th—in conjunction with Srijon Chowdhury’s Since The Garden on view in the main galleries—with an opening reception for the artists on Saturday September 10th, from 6-8pm.
Founded in 1962 and published ten times per year since, Artforum is considered by many to be the publication with the definitive mark of legitimacy in the art world. As Lloyd says, “Every artist wants to be on the cover of Artforum, and if they tell you they don’t, they’re full of shit. It’s a grand gesture in the art world to say that you’ve made it.” Given that recognition however, the works are more humorous and celebratory than cynical. Lloyd creates an invitation to collaborate with artists who have achieved the career hallmark of an Artforum cover, and coopts Artforum's logo—with its status as a symbol of institutional authority and approval—for his own work. The original covers are collaged upon with images ranging from the art historical to the popular, painted and drawn upon, and scraped, with text crossed out and redrawn. In one instance, a cover featuring a painting from On Kawara’s “Today” series has been scratched out, with the date replaced by Lloyd’s birthday. Lloyd’s vibrant colors and energetic compositional choices transform the magazine cover space as an arbiter of importance and fashion into a place for artistic agency and collaborative play.
David Lloyd graduated with a BFA from CalArts in 1985, and began his career with a series of intelligent, near-humorous abstractions, turning towards the incorporation of imagistic referents several years later. Recent paintings have moved back and forth between abstraction and recognizable image, with compositions that utilize those forms as parts of the same visual language rather than opposing ideas. Lloyd has shown in California at Klowden Mann, East Side International, Otis College of Art and Design, Margo Leavin Gallery, Gallery Paule Anglim and the Orange County Museum of Art as well as many others, and at Metro Pictures and Milk Gallery in New York. His work has been written about extensively, and he is included in the collections of the Orange County Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and the Getty.