Drew Merritt's studio visit for Thinkspace Project room exhibition Slaying Idols.
Los Angeles-based artist Drew Merritt. Known for his hyperreal rendering and darkly stylized
painting aesthetic, Merritt creates sparse works set against nondescript areas of negative white space. Primarily figurative in focus, Merritt’s pieces rely on intense shadow and regions of
lightlessness to create a feeling of dramatic contrast.
A talented painter and muralist who began his art career as a graffiti artist, Merritt’s compositions often convey a level of human discomfort or unease through figures staged in contorted poses or through imagery posited through slightly distorted vantage points to impress a feeling of visual tension. Often capturing vulnerable or mysterious moments in some larger narrative arc, his works feel ambiguous and poetically saturated. Hoping that his work speaks
for itself, Merritt resists the tendency towards excessive explication, preferring that it resonate with the viewer directly unmediated in its delivery.
THINKSPACE PROJECTS
6009 Washington Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
ABOUT THINKSPACE
Thinkspace was founded in 2005; now in LA’s Culver City Arts District, the gallery has garnered an international reputation as one of the most active and productive exponents of the New Contemporary Art Movement. Maintaining its founding commitment to the promotion and support of its artists, Thinkspace has steadily expanded its roster and diversified its projects, creating collaborative and institutional opportunities all over the world. Founded in the spirit of forging recognition for young, emerging, and lesser-known talents, the gallery is now home to artists from all over the world, ranging from the emerging, mid-career, and established.
The New Contemporary Art Movement, not unlike its earlier 20th Century counterparts like Surrealism, Dada, or Fauvism, ultimately materialized in search of new forms, content, and expressions that cited rather than disavowed the individual and the social. The earliest incarnations of the Movement, refusing the paradigmatic disinterest of “Art” as an inaccessible garrison of ‘high culture’, championed figuration, surrealism, representation, pop culture, and the subcultural. By incorporating the ‘lowbrow,’ accessible, and even profane, an exciting and irreverent art movement grew in defiance of the mandated renunciations of “high” art. Emerging on the West Coast in the 90’s partly as a response to the rabid ‘conceptual-turn’ then championed on the East Coasts, the Movement steadily created its own platforms, publications, and spaces for the dissemination of its imagery and ideas.
Though the New Contemporary Art Movement has remained largely unacknowledged by the vetted institutions of the fine art world and its arbiters of ‘high culture,’ the future promises a shift. The Movement’s formative aversion to the establishment is also waning in the wake of its increased visibility, institutional presence, and widespread popularity.
Thinkspace has sought to champion and promote the unique breadth of the Movement, creating new opportunities for the presentation of its artists and work. Though still very much invested in the elevation and exposure of its emerging talents, the gallery, now in its 13th year, has come into its own with a roster that reflects this maturity. An active advocate for what is now one of the longest extant organized art movement’s in history, Thinkspace is an established voice for its continued growth and evolution.
The gallery has in recent years expanded its projects beyond Los Angeles, exhibiting with partner galleries and organizations in Berlin, Hong Kong, London, New York City, Detroit, Chicago, and Honolulu among many others, participating in International Art Fairs, and curating New Contemporary content for Museums. Committed to the vision, risk, and exceptional gifts of its artists, the gallery is first and foremost a family. From the streets to the museums, and from the “margins” to the white cube, Thinkspace is re-envisioning what it means to be “institutional.”
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