Dark Star

Gallery Luisotti is pleased to present Dark Star, a new series of large-scale photographs by John Divola. This exhibition is the artist’s first solo show at the gallery. Exhibited along with a selection of images from the artist’s classic “Vandalism” series from the 1970s, Dark Starbrings together the disparate concerns which have informed Divola’s work for the past three decades, creating a compelling investigation into the relationship between site, artistic intervention, and photographic documentation.

The imposition of black circles in the large-scale Dark Star works—painted in situ by the artist on the walls of abandoned houses—serves to disrupt any simple reading of the photographs. At once painterly and photographic, the images evoke a variety of possible interpretations: they act at once as documents of site-specific interventions, poetic evocations of civic decay as registered by architectural details, and as aesthetic artifacts in their own right.

Skepticism, the questioning of the limits of the rational, is at the core of Divola’s inquiry. The title of the series intimates a final stasis toward which all reason eventually moves.

In conjunction with Dark Star, the gallery will present six images from his earliest series, Vandalism. These smaller-scale, vintage black and white photographs from the mid-seventies trace a line of inquiry from the artist’s beginnings to the present. Granting the viewer a glimpse of Divola’s earliest conceptual concerns, they foreshadow the Dark Star images made over thirty years later.

John Divola has exhibited his work in numerous solo and group shows, and was a recipient of both the Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. For a full curriculum vitae of the artist, please contact Gallery Luisotti by phone or email.