LOS ANGELES, CA.- KP Projects will present the Los Angeles book release and signing event for Todd Schorr’s most comprehensive monograph to date, “Neverlasting Miracles.” The artist will be signing and dedicating books in person from 5pm – 8pm at the gallery along with music and light refreshments. The gallery will also feature a preview exhibition of new original paintings, and iconic limited edition prints in celebration of the artist’s upcoming exhibition at MOCA Virginia, set to open this Fall. KP Projects’ two-week exhibition will continue through September 1st.
Published by Last Gasp, San Francisco, “Neverlasting Miracles” is an expansive 304 page, hard bound monograph, spanning 30 years of Todd Schorr’s enduring career as a painter and maverick in the Pop Surreal / Low Brow Art Movement. Featuring beautifully printed color plates, and comprehensive essays by Gary Sawyer, (Physical Anthropologist, American Museum of Natural History, NY, NY), and American Science Fiction writer Paul Di Filippo, the book chronicles the artist’s work and career with deft observation and reverence.
Schorr’s newest paintings, Pinky and Blue Boy are innovative twists on two historic paintings at the Huntington Museum of Art. They work as a pair, with a continuous landscape background that carries over from one painting into the next. As a reference to the proto-Cubist landscapes of Cezanne, the pixelated landscape also alludes to the digital resolution of our technology mediated society. The larger theme expresses our evolutionary journey as humans, with the climax culminating in a romantic phone tweet. In Diana Battles the Wizard of Irrational Aesthetics, a naturalistic Diana battles a molecular wizard holding a scalpel and an exaggerated anime figure of the goddess. As an allegory about the societal pressure for cosmetic enhancement, Schorr celebrates the virtue of the female form, and the Classical proportions found in art and nature as Diana slays irrational notions of beauty.
"Like any artist of worth, it took many long years of struggle and investigative thought along with trial and error as well as constant honing of technique to reach the point where I felt I had created a language which, when spoken well, would command some semblance of purpose… My work represents an ongoing fascination with a world in constant evolution and transition that I’ve attempted to represent through a combination of abstract cartoon vocabulary given realization through the painting techniques of the old masters. A world made all the more bittersweet by the simple fact that none of its many miracles are everlasting.”
My new works seek to entertain while at the same time provide the viewer with tasty morsels of contemplative thought.” -Todd Schorr
With deftness and humor, Schorr beautifully masterminds fables and allegories that incorporate nostalgic characters of Western cultural history alongside creations purely of his own imagination. An advocate for the anthropology of popular culture, Schorr’s unabashed storylines touch on everything from power, to technology, and unrealistic standards of perfection. Each idea is loaded with intent, yet ultimately serves as an open invitation for contemplation.
