This exhibition marks the first time that the preliminary materials that generate Damian Loeb's paintings, including collage, drawings, photographs, and film clips, have been shown in relationship to the paintings. The artist's appropriation of images from contemporary visual culture is well known, but the evolution of the specific physical working process that generates his paintings has not been publicly examined. Since the mid 1990s the artist's work has gone through three distinct phases: creation of imagery from cut paper collages made from photographs reproduced in magazines and in photographer's monographs and other books; images created from collages (both paper and digital) made from video stills captured from feature film DVDs; and most recently, images made from the artist's own digital photographs that have been manipulated in the computer. In this exhibition a single painting, shown in conjunction with background material culled from the artist's archives, represents each of these three approaches. This material reveals a painter whose work is informed equally by the history of painting, photography, and film, and the way in which these histories collide and interact in the service of reinventing realist painting in the digital age.

Loeb acknowledges through his work the inescapable fact of the power and primacy of photographically-based imagery in today's world. Despite this view, Loeb is interested in the craft of painting, and how painting can mediate the gap between popular culture and traditional painting concerns. Until the mid-twentieth century painting alone had the ability to create iconic images in Western culture (Mona Lisa and American Gothic are part of the same continuum), but the advent of photography, film, television, and the Net have made media-based culture the source of virtually everything that is visually emblematic in the present day. This sea change was heralded by Andy Warhol, who was the first artist to fully articulate the primacy of media imagery and apply this belief to the practice of painting. Warhol's work was subsequently followed by movements such as photorealism in the 1970s and appropriation in the 1980s that explored, respectively, the camera as a primary source and the creative recycling of products of cultural fabrication. Loeb's work since the mid 1990s has certainly built on these legacies, but his unique trajectory has been based in the rise of another powerful reproductive media, the computer.

Loeb's first job in the art world was as a photo archivist for the painter Alexis Rockman. Culling through magazines and books for nature-based images for Rockman to use as source material, Loeb began to hoard his own archive of photographic reproductions, choosing material on an intuitive rather than a systematic basis. Loeb's first mature paintings were based on collages created from this material, and led to the notorious lawsuits over copyright infringement that the artist fought in the 1990s. Looking at these images now, one is struck by a consistent dialectical approach: the juxtaposition of two primary sources that create drama due to their contrasting nature. This body of work usually has either sexuality or violence as subject matter, and seems strangely prophetic from the standpoint of our post-9/11 world. Works such as A BLUR (1996), which depict Muslim extremists and a young woman on a subway platform, don't come out of jaded art-world appropriation, but rather a media-based urgency that is more reminiscent of CNN or the Web site of The New York Times.

The second phase of Loeb's work was based in the artist's obsession with the craftsmanship of Hollywood, coupled with his ability to carefully analyze and dissect film that came about with the introduction of the DVD. Loeb has an archive of films on DVD, which beginning in 1998 he utilized for a series of paintings based primarily on panning or tracking shots from horror and sci-fi films such as The Shining and Close Encounters. Loeb would freeze individual frames that comprise a lengthy shot, and subsequently fuse them together using both Photoshop and traditional collage techniques, creating images that don't exist in the original film. Working only with films that have an iconic position in culture, the artist's process not only uniquely transposes a time-based media into painting, but also acknowledges cinemagraphic authorship while simultaneously acting on the artistic prerogative to forge art from any and all sources. The cryptic titles for these film-based works come from either dialogue or text found within the utilized scenes.

Included in this exhibition is THE VANISHING (SPOORLOOS) (2006), a work that exists both as an autonomous photograph and a painting. Loeb's process has come full circle with this new approach, with the artist responsible for all of his photo-based, digital source material. Loeb has not entirely abandoned his cinemagraphic gaze, however, showing a clear interest in pictures that relate to the media imagery he has utilized in the past. Pursuing circumstances where opportunities that interest him are more likely to exist, he describes his working method as "going on a safari." THE VANISHING (SPOORLOOS) is based on a photo taken in fashion designer Calvin Klein's driveway following a party, combining a candid paparazzi-like approach with the low-angle drama of a Hollywood storyboard. It is interesting that Loeb has custom-etched a 1:2 aspect ratio rectangle on the viewfinder of his camera to approximate the standard ratio of a movie screen, in addition to frequently utilizing actual motion-picture lenses to achieve the visual effects found in film. Loeb's interest in phenomena such as lens flair distances his work from photorealism, drawing attention more to the view through the camera itself rather than the resulting photograph.

Loeb describes the computer as "the great equalizer," enabling the archiving, analysis, editing, and manipulation of diverse images from multiple sources. His photographs are never translated unaltered into paint, but go through a rigorous process of re-imaging in programs such as Photoshop. Visiting Loeb in his studio resembles observing the production room for a network news program, with an abundance of hardware driving banks of monitors. This media obsession extends into real time with live feeds from video cameras focused on the street outside his New York City studio. Loeb's vocabulary is clearly dependant on and integrated into contemporary media, and he skillfully exploits all the tools that are currently available. Standing at his easel, however, he critically understands that information without corporeality is as dead as yesterday's headlines.

— Richard Klein, Director of Exhibitions