David Lloyd
New Paintings
October 25 - January 10, 2015
Opening Reception: October 25, 6–8pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, November 22, 4pm

Klowden Mann is very pleased to present David Lloyd's New Paintings, the Los Angeles-based artist's third solo show at the gallery. Lloyd's new work is a combination of formal abstraction and narrative irreverence. Using materials including acrylic and spray paint, texture paste, collage, graphite and ink, Lloyd presents paintings on raw canvas that build upon his early history as an abstract painter in the 80's while synthesizing the feeling of the pseudo-scientific and spiritual narratives that permeated his most recent work. Here, he has removed all but the smallest narrative moments, with canvases ranging in size from 11 by 14 inches to 7 by 9 feet, and offering brightly colored geometric forms with near- anthropomorphic personality, moving across the raw canvas and accompanied by highly articulated drawn lines and areas of densely textured paint. The exhibition will take place from October 25th through January 10th, with an opening reception on Saturday, October 25th, from 6-8pm.

David Lloyd (b. 1955, Los Angeles, CA) graduated with a BFA from CalArts in 1985, and began his career with solo exhibitions at Margo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles. His broad exhibition history includes exhibitions at Klowden Mann, Gallery Paule Anglim, the Orange County Museum of Art and the Museum of Art and History in California, as well as Metro Pictures and Milk Gallery in New York, along with many others. His work has been written about extensively, including the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, The Washington Post, Art & Auction, The New York Times, Huffington Post, and Art. Ltd. His work is in private collections internationally, and public collections include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Getty, the Orange County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

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Catalogue essay

THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE
by Jason Ramos

Artists' responses to 21st century concerns continue to reflect the current age's pervasive, quickening pace, and the density of information we have become accustomed to assimilating on a daily basis. Older languages and idioms such as painting are adapted, quoted, mashed-up, and regularly take on additional meanings through new contexts and appropriations. Conversely, new languages and idioms are introduced through the vocabulary of the old, having a reflexive and expansive effect on the original concepts. This is especially true when the original language manages to be broad yet somehow clear enough about its constraints to allow for coherent conceptualization. The recent paintings of David Lloyd are products of this paradoxical crucible, each painting another conclusion drawn from an active skepticism and articulation of some of the most basic, formal notions of image-making. A surface reading of Lloyd’s new work indicates a synthesis of earlier inquiries into formal abstraction and more recent narrative impulses. However, the conclusions he draws are more than a simple hybridized amalgam of disparate elements, rather, they are an enlightened realizing and democratization of painting’s many systems of imagery. The consistent vocabulary of his motifs seems beholden to another kind of logic—a specifically painterly logic–that in times past would have been complemented by a philosophy rooted in theosophy, spiritualism, Jungian analysis, etc. The subsequent postmodern demolishing of such ideas has given way to a new age of addressing and continuing these notions through a more skeptical lens. Lloyd's ability to see through this lens was first developed during the 1980s as a student at CalArts, where the very concept of painting as a viable contemporary language was continually challenged and questioned. (click here to continue reading)