New York, NY --- Acquavella Galleries is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of a new body of work by Damian Loeb. Presented exclusively at Frieze New York this May, the paintings represents three years of work exploring the most elemental of pursuits, geometric abstraction, and the most final of concepts: life, death, and rebirth. Titled All Hope Is Lost the artist chose this specifically limited time and place to show his most intimate and political works to date. Though abstract in their representation of a monumental event, these paintings are entirely honest and intimate depictions of the North American solar eclipse that occurred on August 21, 2017.
The name is derived from the pivotal chapter in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey, where the phrase both alludes to an individual's inescapable contemplation of fate, failure, and mortality, and more concisely is used to describe the dramatic moment of greatest peril when there appears to be no possible way to win or survive. These incidents usually immediately precede and precipitate the archetypal hero's reemergence, wiser and prepared for victory. For the artist, this series represents his own personal challenges as well as exploring the universal nature of the quietly enormous moments rendered in these paintings to reflect the fine line between optimism and defeat, good and evil, and light and dark.
“Stopping the movement of the sun and the moon, Loeb creates an image of an extended present which we can contemplate in our own time,” writes Dr. Robert Shane, professor of art history at the College of St. Rose, in his catalogue essay for the series. “In response to this realization, Loeb offers us through his paintings a point of contact, of sensory intimacy, allowing us to survive, for a time, the inhumanity of the cosmos.”