Michael Dopp - Dilate

May 8 - June 5, 2010
Opening reception Saturday, May 8, 6-9pm

Michael Dopp - Untitled (Kite 2)

Michael Dopp, Untitled (Kite 2), 2010. Acrylic on canvas, 64" X 48".

Michael Dopp's paintings are both dense and bare, open and closed, expanding and contracting. The work arrives out of successive stages that simultaneously complete and frustrate each other. Such stages are evident in the array of marks - networks of lines creating patterns, which suggest both spatial qualities and underscore the flatness of the canvas' surface. The forms found in Dopp's work maintain a common subject, that of perspectival lines, of vanishing points and the cube. The repetition of forms and lines establishes a seriality while also locating the viewer in a deeply personal space. Out of these tensions he creates a mapping of process and psychic space.

The works in this exhibition explore a rich and stark monochromatic pallete and utilize the raw canvas as a drawing material. Dopp applies paint with large palette knives and delicate automotive pin-striping brushes. The paintings vacillate between soft and hard, organic and geometric, warm and cool. While they reference and suggest minimalist and structuralist works, their psychological and metaphysical resonance attaches them to tantra and mandala paintings. Their mood is alchemical, a transmuting of process and image, one mark is present and impenetrable, the next is absent and exposed.

This is Michael Dopp's first solo exhibition after finishing his MFA from UCLA in 2009. He has an upcoming solo exhibition in at Galleria Studio Legale (Caserta, Italy). Previously, Dopp's paintings have been exhibited in group shows at Five Thirty Three (Los Angeles), Steve Turner (Los Angeles), HJKB (Brooklyn) and Black Dragon Society (Los Angeles) among others. Dopp received his BFA in 2005 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

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