Joe Clower: Past and Present
Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture
June 28- July 26, 2008
Artist Reception June 28, 2008 6-8 p.m.

Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art is presenting an exhibition of paintings, drawings and sculpture by Joe Clower, an important if perhaps little remembered participant in the transformation of Los Angeles art culture that occurred in the decade of the 1980’s.

Clower arrived here from Colorado in the late 1970’s and he has since returned to that state. In the years he lived and worked in Los Angeles, Clower was an early and effective proponent of what might be called the “comic book paradigm” in contemporary art. Besides publishing his own comic book “Modern Drawing” (with Mary Jones) in 1979, Clower embarked on an ongoing series of paintings that powerfully leverage his insights into comic book aesthetics, often finding there a formal beauty hidden in plain sight. In the same spirit the artist would deliberately blur the distinction between high-art and popular culture as when, years later, he took his self-made collection of flying saucer photographs around to UFO conventions where he once won the award for “best picture.”

Perhaps most importantly, Clower’s long standing fixation with the early modern science of Thomas Alva Edison, Nikolai Tesla and others–as evidenced both in he artist’s imagery and in his obsessive method of execution–suggested the possibility of a ew artist ideal-type, the fevered teenager working all hours on some mad scientist project in his parents’ garage. In this Clower prefigured by years the historic turn to adolescent male subjectivity now associated with a younger and more famous cohort of Los Angeles artists.

The exhibition “Joe Clower: Past and Present” will include old, recent and new examples of he artist’s work.

Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art
8568 Washington Blvd. Culver City, CA 90232
Gallery hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 11:00 am-6:00 pm

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