Night Gallery is pleased to present Sticks and Stones, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Andy Woll. This is his first exhibition with the gallery.
In Woll’s Mt. Wilson series, the highest point of the San Gabriel Mountains is depicted repeatedly, in varying sizes and colors. Mt. Wilson’s presence in relation to Los Angeles is that of a backdrop, an overarching image that recedes from the immediacy of quotidian exchanges happening within the city. The mountain becomes similarly diffuse in Woll’s paintings—ubiquitous and iconic, at least to those living in Los Angeles, it is a subject to hang the act of painting on. For Woll, painting is an intuitive, associative act, in which he paints quickly after preparing a ground, developing each color palette according to themes in the music he listens to while working.
Sticks and Stones are what mountains are made of, and in the children’s adage, are a symbol of fallible physicality. In Woll’s paintings the physical size and substance of Mt. Wilson as a landform is not so important as is the quiet experience of its visual and psychological presence; he paints as a meditation on the interior, emotive responses to an exterior reality.
Andy Woll (b. Los Angeles, CA, 1984) received his BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2007. His work has been shown at multiple venues in Los Angeles, including Blum and Poe and Gallery 3209, and most recently at Monte Vista Projects in a two-person exhibition with Jake Longstreth. Woll lives and works in Los Angeles.