Untitled, 2019, Orange

John Knuth’s creative conjurings challenge traditional notions of art making, even in this millennium. His paintings force extreme tension between the sacred and the profane, creating stunning works by way of indelicate techniques. Knuth’s mission is to take something traditionally regarded as base, and to make it into something magnificent, where the materials feel secondary to the radical result. Knuth’s approach is alchemical. Like an art world diviner, he conjures the elements, from making burn paintings with distress flares and metallic space blankets to using fly regurgitation to make the most incandescent, shimmering paintings. He has perfected his process using flyspeck, which can be said to fall within the art historical continuum that includes the Pre-Raphaelites’ Mummy Brown or Chris Ofili’s elephant dung.

Knuth first gained attention for his fly paintings in 2013 when The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles made a documentary that explored his leveraging of the biological processes of flies to create abstract landscapes on canvas. “East Side” 2017, from Knuth’s most recent series of ‘fly paintings’ takes inspiration from New York City, and in particular the waterways which surround the city and have made it an essential hub. As such, the color palette of “East Side” is largely based in hues of blue, overlaid with a striking haze of vibrant magenta which dissipates into a fine, delicate mist, evoking the scene of a NYC sunset. The artist relishes the unpredictable outcomes of these fly works, likening the flies’ organic chaos to the hectic nature of the modern urban environment. The works are landscapes that explore the boundary between beauty and decay, and the line between attraction and revulsion.

The artist’s process begins with mail-ordering hundreds of thousands of maggots. These are placed in a specially built enclosure consisting of two facing canvases encased in netting and are allowed to develop into mature houseflies. Knuth’s flies feed on a steady diet of sugar water infused with watercolor paint, which they continually ingest and regurgitate over the course of two to three months. These tiny regurgitations cover the canvases in a pointillist mist, rendering vividly-colored and incandescent works. This process mimics the relationships between humans and the urban environments which they inhabit. In regards to the conceptual underpinnings of his fly paintings, Knuth has said: “I have always been fascinated by and taken inspiration from artist Gustave Courbet, and in particular his focus on portraying the realities of the common man. For me, this is where the fly paintings begin, with the fly serving as a stand-in for man and the final painting encapsulating what can be created when we work together. At the same time, human production has, and continues to, rapidly reshape the world, in ways that we cannot yet fully understand. Exploring the ramifications of that change, particularly to the natural landscape, is another important underlying theme to the fly works and to my practice at large.”

John Knuth was born in 1978 in Minneapolis, Minnesota and lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He received an MFA from University of Southern California and a BFA from the University of Minnesota. Knuth’s recent solo exhibitions include Powerplant at Brand New Gallery, Milan, Italy; Base Alchemy at 5 Car Garage, Santa Monica, CA; Master Plan at Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, IL; Elevated Uncertainty at Marie Kirkegaard, Copenhagen, Denmark; and Fading Horizon at Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA. His works has recently been included in group shows at International Print Center, New York, NY; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; MassArt, Boston, MA; Self-Titled, Tilburg, NL; Loudhailer, Greene Exhibitions, China Art Objects and Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, CA, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Hollis Taggart was founded in 1979, with a mission to present museum-quality works of art, maintain a program motivated by scholarship, and offer personalized support in all aspects of art collecting. Today, the gallery’s program encompasses contemporary practitioners, as a vital component to art historical discourse. abc carpet & home is excited to partner with Hollis Taggart to showcase select works at our Manhattan Flagship.