ADAM BALL
DIRTY PATTERN
May 4 – June 3, 2006
Private View Thursday, May 4, 6 – 8 pm

Paul Kasmin Gallery is pleased to announce our upcoming exhibition of new works by British Artist Adam Ball, on view at 511 West 27th Street from May 4 through June 3, 2006. Dirty Pattern represents recent paintings and drawings documenting the artist’s explorations of patterns found in nature and the influence of these patterns on Ball’s other diverse sources such as Neolithic carvings, arborglyphs and Victorian wallpaper. These explorations are merged creating a fusion between the artist’s surroundings and another ethereal world of fantasy, magic and pagan sun worship.

Ball’s work took him to several Neolithic tombs and burial mounds where he documented 5,000-year-old carvings. These carvings were then used to make rubbings that were the starting point for drawings, and later used in paintings. Like the ancient carvings which were created to align with the sun at certain times of the year and transcend the viewer into a pagan trance, Ball’s layers of oil paint are added over fluorescent spray paint to build up a disorientating surface pattern with no beginning or end: concentric coils that repeat endlessly. As art critic Adrian Dannatt said: “Ball wishes to slow and steady our gaze, to lure us into the appropriate concentration upon each work, so it may “give back” all of its own making. And this is achieved not just by the initial sensual pleasure of the work but by the layers of application, the palimpsest of painterly decision built into each surface.”

Ball’s use of psalligraphy (the ancient art of paper-cutting), also exhibited, is employed to create a delicate homage to an ephemeral world. As a counter point to the psychedelic fluorescent paintings, the white-on-white or black-on-black paper cut outs are a plane of tranquillity with distilled timelessness.

Dirty Pattern will be open for viewing at 511 West 27th Street, Tuesday – Saturday, 10am – 6pm.
This exhibition is in association with MDG Fine Arts Ltd., London.