James Esber

Last updated
James Esber
James Esber.jpg
Born1961 (age 6263)
Cleveland, Ohio
Education Cleveland Institute of Art, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Temple University in Rome
Styleneo-pop
Spouse Jane Fine

James Esber is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. He is known for paintings that utilize a wide range of materials, including Plasticine, to distort and reconstruct images of American pop culture. [1] [2]

Contents

Along with his wife, the artist Jane Fine, he creates collaborative drawings under the pseudonym "J. Fiber". [3] [4]

Career

Esber moved to New York in 1986 and quickly settled in the nascent art community of Williamsburg. [5] He came to prominence as one of only ten artists from New York, including Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin, who were chosen for the Art Under 30: FIAR International Prize, curated by Dan Cameron. [6]

In the early 1990s, Esber completed a series of works called Hate Images, begun while a fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. [7] These paintings transformed images of recognizable stereotypes by distorting them beyond easy recognition, and were similar to the works shown at his first solo exhibition at Pierogi 2000 in Williamsburg. [8] Distortion and plasticity continue to inform Esber's practice, which, described by the artist and critic Drew Lowenstein can be characterized by "grotesque, trippy amalgams on canvas and in plasticine wall adhesions". [9]

Another aspect of this Esber's practice concerns the transformation of presidents Abraham Lincoln and Richard Nixon, which David Geers referred to as a type of historical portraiture in BOMB. [10] Tricky Dick (1997-1998), a flattened and warped cartoon of Richard Nixon, was included in the Pop Surrealism exhibition from 1998 curated by Richard Klein, Dominique Nahas, Harry Philbrick, and Ingrid Schaffner for the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. [11]

Esber is also known for works that involve participatory art practice, including This Is Not a Portrait (2009-2011), in which over a hundred people were tasked with making an ink drawing of Osama bin Laden during the War in Afghanistan. [12]

Major exhibitions

Esber's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. A retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Clifford Gallery at Colgate University, where he showed four decades of work. [13] Solo exhibitions have been held at museums and galleries including the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, PPOW, and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. [14] [15] [16] Group exhibitions include My Reality: Contemporary Art and the Culture of Japanese Animation at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Now What? at the Norton Museum of Art, and SITE Santa Fe’s Fifth International Biennial: Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque, curated by Robert Storr. [17] [18]

Awards, fellowships, and residencies

Selected solo and collaborative exhibitions

Selected group exhibitions

Public collections

Bibliography

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References

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