Night Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition walkthrough and conversation between artists Sarah Awad and Frank J. Stockton to punctuate the closing weekend of Double Field, Awad’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, Saturday October 6th at 2pm.
Awad and Stockton met fourteen years ago while attending undergrad together in 2004. At that time, Stockton was an upperclassman and Awad was beginning her arts education, however, that dynamic was reversed several years later when Awad was finishing her masters degree at UCLA just as Stockton was beginning there. Parallel paths in both academia and art have allowed for an appreciation of each other’s work that goes beyond the canvas and into an understanding of the pedagogies & personalities that shape their individual practices.
The two will discuss depictions of the female nude and its relationship to the history of abstract painting in Awad’s current body of work on display at the gallery. Awad’s recent paintings prominently depict figures that scale themselves to occupy their respective fields of canvas. Elongated and doubled, these dynamic bodies feel unmistakably sculptural as they approach a scale twice that of their viewers. The conversation will address Awad’s compositional and narrative choices as they relate to certain historical paintings, her process by which bold geometric washes become prompts for the teasing out of fragmented figures, and her philosophical approach to creating a balance between accident and intention.
Sarah Awad lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include Gate Paintings and The Women at Diane Rosenstein Gallery. Her paintings have been included in Rogue Wave ’13 at LA Louver and group exhibitions in Vienna, New York, Seattle, Rotterdam, and Miami. She received the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA grant in 2011 and her work has been reviewed in Art in America, Modern Painters, and New American Painting. She received her MFA in painting from UCLA in 2011. Her work is in the collection of the Hotel Figueroa in Downtown LA. She teaches on the faculty of UC Irvine.
Frank J. Stockton was an internationally celebrated illustrator and graphic novelist before retiring from commercial art to pursue a graduate degree in painting from UCLA in 2012. Since then, he has had solo exhibitions of his work at DENK and Samuel Freeman galleries, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and was featured twice in New American Paintings. He lives and works in Los Angeles with his wife and son.