Press Release from White Cube for October 1999 Exhibition

Damian Loeb

29 October - 20 November 1999

New paintings by Damian Loeb will be presented by Jay Jopling at White Cube, 44 Duke Street St. James's London SW1Y 6DD.

White Cube is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in London of acclaimed young American painter Damian Loeb.

Loeb makes morally ambiguous portraits of a world in which viewing is close to active participation and a challenge to our own sense of culpability. These fictional documentaries use a vocabulary derived from popular culture mixed with classic painting ideals and techniques. Loeb's narratives are constructed from images culled from movies, magazines, television, and books - seamlessly composed and executed, the hyper-realistic oil paintings have the appearance of stills from familiar, yet impossible to place, movies. The paintings often contain unsettling scenes combining moody landscapes and interiors with characters caught in highly personal moments. The environments colour our interpretations of the individual players. In Roseville, the view through a windscreen and the crepuscular light, highlight the tension of the running girl isolating the viewer from the exterior.

Loeb's paintings are created first as collages - cutting and pasting together laser-copies of images he collects. The collages are used as preliminary sketches; testing both composition and content. Rendered by hand on a rough linen ground, the painting is built up from the background forward sometimes creating an entire landscape painting, later to be obscured by pertinent foreground elements. Transparent glazes used to create jewel-like colours and carefully placed shadows and highlights direct the eye around the compositions. The rough texture and conscientious brush work obscure the artists hand and allow for an undistracted impression of the emotional imagery. The slow and patient painting technique stands in stark contrast to the immediacy of the chosen scenes; forcing the assumption that Loeb has digested and assimilated the subjects themselves and is painting from an emotional memory.

Unlike appropriation art in the 1 980's that involved the cynical plundering of specifically selected images, Loeb instead uses his found material for their intrinsic emotional content. He recontextualizes familiar tropes and feeds them back into the culture which infused them with their potency. The paintings are experiments in juxtaposition, much like digital sampling in modern music - they attach themselves to emotional archetypes in the psyche and, as with dreams, the viewer is called upon to free associate - to find the truths permeating the surreal narratives.

Damian Loeb lives and works in New York. His first solo exhibition was with Mary Boone Gallery in New York last year.

For further information please contact Julia Royse or Annushka Shani on 0171 930 5373. Website address: www.whitecube.com

44 Duke Street

St. James's

London SW1Y 6DD