FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

JOHN EVANS – HAPPY NEW YEAR!    

January 5 – February 3, 2007

PAVEL ZOUBOK GALLERY is pleased to announce HAPPY NEW YEAR!, an exhibition of mixed media collages and early paintings by New York artist JOHN EVANS. Please join us for the opening reception on Friday, January 5 from 6-8pm, or during the run of the exhibition, which continues through February 3. The gallery is located at:533 West 23rd Street (between 10th & 11th Avenues). Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10am-6pm

For almost forty years JOHN EVANS devoted himself to a practice of daily artistic production that resulted in one of the most substantial bodies of work in the history of collage. HAPPY NEW YEAR! ushers 2007 in with a selection of the artist’s “daily collages” from the month of January, drawn from his vast archive of collage diaries. These works, spanning some three decades, not only reflect the artist’s own ideas and experiences at the start of a new year, but our own historical/cultural beginnings and endings.

Starting in 1964, Evans made a collage every day on the page of a bound sketchbook, and rubber stamped each with the date. Filling numerous books, he continued this practice through the year 2000 - the Millennium – a seemingly appropriate end date for the series. Evans’ collage materials range from clippings, business cards, product stickers or labels and ticket stubs to bits of ephemera or anonymous snapshots found on the streets of his East Village neighborhood. Using colored inks, he builds upon the collage elements to create lively, vibrant compositions. Evans’ works are in fact page-sized paintings that extend the boundaries of the collage medium. Formally, they reflect many aspects of their historical antecedents: the use of abstraction; the incorporation of typography and commercial illustration; the ironic juxtaposition, scale shifts and word/image play of Dada; and the disjointed, often erotic, imagery of Surrealism. His collages are mini-time capsules that mark the end of the Vietnam War, the fiscal crisis in New York City during the 1970s, the burgeoning economy, club scene and art market of the1980s, and the AIDS crisis with its devastating effect on the art world. In their daily production, they form both a personal diary and a universal commentary on urban life in the late 20th century.

The current exhibition also includes a series of back and white paintings from the early 1970s. These works, greatly influenced by the lessons of American modernism, explore the geometry of the New York landscape and inform both the structure and iconography of Evans’ collages. Valerie S. Komor, Archivist and curator of the artist’s retrospective at the New-York Historical Society in 2002 writes: “They are steeped in the contemporary scene, whether the streets of New York (Nueva York) and Los Angeles (Smogscape), or the Nixon era (Swastika Rising, Payola, and Justice? For Shame!).  These intimate works, of hand-mixed black acrylic on unprimed canvas, were made just weeks apart during the summer of 1970. They exhibit Evans’ preoccupation with odd geometric shapes and the spatial tensions between them. François Premier-Dan Tyler, painted in 1967, takes its title from Dan Tyler himself, a close friend of Evans who died of AIDS during the 1980s. Tyler was in the studio, saw the regal doublet of the Renaissance king on the canvas and said: “François Premier”!  Love for color and abstract form also permeates the collages Evans had begun making.” She continues:

“The pleasure of looking at an Evans’ collage stems in part from noticing how individual elements--textures, colors, texts, and forms—collected from the New York streets by chance, are deftly arranged and elaborately decorated so that they achieve a wholly unpredictable, and often striking, significance.  The works are strewn with what poet David Lehman refers to as ‘lifeless objects…that work in the sphere of memory the way the metonymy (the part or attribute that stands for the whole) works in rhetoric’.”

Born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota in 1932, John Evans studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and moved to New York in 1963. There he became part of the lively community of painters and poets during that fertile period in American art. His solo exhibitions include “New York Diary: The Collages of John Evans” at the New–York Historical Society, as well as gallery exhibitions at Cordier & Ekstrom, Gracie Mansion, Knoedler and Pavel Zoubok galleries in New York. He has also exhibited at Deptford X in London, the Arts Club of Chicago, and the Newport Harbor Art Museum in Newport Beach, CA.” In 2004 Evans’ work was the subject of a major monograph published by Quantuck Lane Press.

For additional information and images please contact Maggie Seidel at (212) 675 7490 or [email protected]