Gideon Bok: Welcome to the Afterfuture

February 12 - March 16, 2014

Artist Page

Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects presents Welcome to the Afterfuture an installation of new paintings by Gideon Bok (b. 1966). This is Bok’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. Bok recently began a professorship at Boston University; this body of work chronicles his new studio environment in Boston.

Throughout his career, Gideon Bok has recorded the ebb and flow of people and objects in his studio. He accumulates traces of fragmentary experience in his painting, creating a map of the perceptual moment in time. The perspective in Bok’s studio bows and expands – we have the impression of looking in many directions at once. Bok’s layers of translucent paint enable the history of the image to evolve in real time. By overlaying multiple ‘still frames’, Bok envisions a cinematic parallel in painting.

In his new work, Bok’s paintings of records scatter the studio floor. It’s a meta twist: both the records and the paintings of the records have become part of the studio environment. Bok is a musician. His studio interiors are scattered with musical references (instruments, record players and albums), reminding us of the connecting thread between painting and music, in the work of Basquiat, Capt. Beefheart/Don Van Vliet, or John Lurie.

Bok’s documentation of his studio, and performance of perception, strike a chord with the Whitney’s recent Rituals of Rented Island exhibition of 70 – 80’s Performance in artist’s studios, lofts and alternative spaces. Bok’s painting relates as well to the intensive observational painting of Frank Auerbach, and the stylistic invention of painters like Dana Schutz.

Bok received his MFA from Yale in 1996. He is a recipient of a 2004 Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, as well as a Purchase Award through The American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2005, his work was surveyed in an exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art.