Apr 24th 2015

Josh Dihle: Inland Antic

@ Valerie Carberry Gallery

875 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 3860, Chicago IL

Opening Friday, April 24th, from 6PM - 8PM

On view through Saturday, June 6th

Valerie Carberry Gallery is pleased to announce INLAND ANTIC, an exhibition of new work by Chicago-based artist Josh Dihle. It is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and comprises fourteen oil paintings on linen or canvas over panel and one inlaid and incised wooden object.

Often using imagined landscapes as a starting point, Dihle looks deeply but does not idealize the natural world. It is a place both sinister and fragile but most significantly to Dihle, beyond our ken. Plant forms are rendered in superb and repetitive detail but are not of a specific or even earthly place. Dipping and undulating lines make reference to animal and human body contours only to be interrupted by sharp turns that deny their voluptuousness. Bold swaths of color are loudly declarative, then interrupted and scattered with teeth or odd wooden bits.

Dihle’s paintings lend themselves to deep and focused interpretation. His layered, dense and twisting compositions wrestle and writhe with the inherent contradictions of image making and reward those willing to see their unlikely grace. Throughout is a subversive expression of desire that is fresh, original and daring.

JOSH DIHLE (b. 1984) received his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL in 2012 and his BA at Middlebury College, VT in 2007. Recent exhibitions include DUTTON, New York; University of Maine Museum of Art, Bangor; Champion, Austin; Autumn Space, Chicago; and Pleasant Plains, Washington D.C. This spring he will be included in New American Paintings: Midwest Edition at the Elmhurst Art Museum. Dihle teaches in the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a co-director at the artist-run gallery Julius Caesar.

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