EXPO 2024

Chris Sharp Gallery is pleased to do a solo presentation of the Los Angeles-based painter, Tyler Vlahovich at EXPO Chicago.

For this new body of work, Vlahovich continues his exploration of abstraction, both its origins and contemporary manifestations. This series, which sees the artist scaling up significantly to encompass the viewer, concentrates on an all over composition built up over a solid red ground with striated and stacked segments of white, indigo, aquamarine, and jade. The tension between background and foreground contributes to the vibrant pictorial texture of the work. Although what is depicted intends or hopes to be a kind of pure abstraction, analogies to nature do occur. The imagery can bring to mind everything from subaquatic fields of swaying plant life to fluvial strata, not to mention the facets of crystals, as if they were unfolded and laid flat across a surface. At times, what he paints is evocative of stained glass, at others, the formal legacies of Marsden Hartley, Frank Stella, and Miyoko Ito, and even further back, European constructivism and cubism. Dynamic, moody, and strangely lyrical, these paintings possess the uncanny quality of tumbling and flowing downward while remaining perfectly still, like a natural event miraculously arrested in mid-motion. Their contribution to contemporary painting, and the abiding discussion around non-objective work, is unique and palpably refreshing. Eschewing the spiritual, utopian and heroic origins of abstraction, the work ultimately insists on an empirical experience of the body in front of the painting. Less interested in transcendence than affirmation, these paintings celebrate the phenomenology of seeing.