Lauren Powell Presents:
~ Andrew Jilka ~
Untitled Bunker Drawings
August 10 - September 10, 2020
In March, Andrew’s studio closed due to Covid, but he was able to keep his practice alive in his apartment by creating intricate and impressive graphite drawings - the Untitled Bunker Drawings. Many of these skilled exercises of necessity have evolved into full scale paintings since, and can be seen on his website HERE. Andrew’s brilliant mix of historical “high art” references with recognizable cartoon-like illustrations immediately read as familiar, but also perplexing due to their constant juxtaposition of styles & themes. It’s almost like looking at an image search history on our internet browser: multiple tabs open, mixed information & topics on top of the next. Who and what will save us next? Maybe most important is his perfect, clean execution, where the cartoons look more like tattoos on the painting’s surface. So clean & sharp they were more likely produced by an inkjet printer than rendered by the human hand.
Andrew Jilka is an American painter from Salina, Kansas currently living and working in Brooklyn with a BFA from the University of Kansas, and an MFA from School of Visual Arts in New York. He recently had a solo show titled ‘Meditations’ at TEAM Gallery in TriBeCa, and will be sharing new paintings in a forthcoming exhibition in 2021 at Galeria Tiro al Blanco in Guadalajara, Mexico.
“My work sets its sights on the accessibility of contemporary art and a shared familiarity of institutionally-endorsed works, contemporary truisms, and a collective search for guidance. My paintings map out scenes of collision with the aim of a reconciliation of imagistic stylizations unbound by time and place. They are driven by investigations of certainty and ambiguity, stoic logic and sophist contemplation. I play with doubt, perception, and multiplicity, deriving meaning and visual pleasure from the relational coherences and disjunctures. I’m obsessed with the place where 21st Century apocalyptic anxiety says hello to blasé optimism.” - Andrew