Friedrich Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Jon Pylypchuk.

In The War, Pylypchuk mounts teams of large-scale illuminated sculptures on opposite walls. These dissident objects hover sizing each other up in a perpetual standoff. The sculptures have an appearance of tribal masks, much like a display from the Metropolitan's Oceanic Department; but rather made with an arsenal of home improvement materials: resin, expanding foam, spun steel and aluminum spray-painted. With this Pylypchuk creates his own unique universe of Arte Povera gone emo-pop, with winks to Disney and late Goya.

Jon Pylypchuk has long made a world of anthropomorphized animals stuffed and suffering a multitude of mishapes. In the past, He has explored social themes such as violence, illness, poverty, and loss. The War continues in this vein, with a muted theatricality: each object interiorly lit, seemingly caught in night-vision sight. Pylypchuk poses war as what may be the ultimate masculine action clouded as cartoon melancholia.

Pylypchuk was born in Winnigpeg, Canada in 1972 and lives and works in Los Angeles. He was a founding member of the collaborative Royal Art Lodge while at the University of Manitoba and received his MFA from UCLA in 2001. He currently has a solo exhibition at at the Blaffer Gallery, The Art Museum of the University of Houston, which is view through February 6, 2010, and is accompanied by a comprehensive new catalogue.. The exhibition, curated by Claudia Schmuckli, Director and Chief Curator, is a ten-year survey of over 75 works, including significant new sculptural installations. In 2010, he will have another survery show at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, and he has had recent solo exhibitions at Ausstellungshalle Zeitgenössische Kunst Münster, The Art Gallery of Calgary, MoCA Cleveland, and his paintings, sculptures drawings and videos have been exhibited widely in the United States, Europe and Asia. His work is in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. This is Jon Pylypchuk's fifth solo exhibition at Friedrich Petzel Gallery.


The gallery is located at 537 West 22nd Street, New York, NY, 10011. For further information, please contact the gallery at info@petzel.com, or call (212) 680-9467.