Exhibition

Douglas Pendleton
After Party
March 4, 2023 - April. 26, 2023

Douglas Pendleton, After Party, Louis Buhl, 2.jpeg

Douglas Pendleton, After Party, Louis Buhl, 4.jpeg

Louis Buhl & Co. is pleased to announce a forthcoming exhibition with Detroit-based artist Douglas Pendleton titled After Party and opening March 4th, 2023. Exploring the struggles and joys of modern existence, Pendleton pulls objects and settings from his day-to-day life to forge whimsical and dense paintings that offer viewers a rich and immersive visual experience. He references genre painting as a point of departure to create his elaborate tableaux, which bear strong influences from art history yet emerge as intelligible expressions of contemporary culture.

The two largest paintings in the show reside against the gallery’s center wall and chronicle a masquerade party from dusk to dawn through ingenious effects of light. Masquerade balls have long been a recurring theme within the medium throughout time, often used to explore ideas of identity, social status, and human nature; take Thomas Couture's After the Ball, a painting that portrays a group of party-goers in Grecian attire, fast asleep in a parlor following a night of indulgence as a commentary on the transience of excessive pleasure. Positioned in the background of Pendleton’s The Costume Party, a woman sports a black Moretta, a Venetian mask of seduction strictly reserved for females in the 16th and 17th centuries. To her right, a man dons a Buata mask, also of Venetian origin and at the same point in time regularly worn by elitists and commoners for its ability to enable anonymous living and disrupt social barriers. Through the paradoxical presence of his varied subjects—for example, Raphael and an astronaut, respective symbols of the past and the future, or Harlequin and Pierrot, two traditional commedia dell’arte characters widely addressed within painting from artists of the High Renaissance to Picasso and the Modernists—Pendleton toys with time and creates a unified space for these distinct eras to coexist.

Although much attention is paid to the narrative and visual aspects of the paintings, they largely serve as formal exercises. In preparation for the exhibition, Pendleton engaged in a deliberate process of isolating individual components of his elaborate compositions, allowing him to address his larger works with greater intentionality and efficiency; as the artists describes, “It’s about what you want to say, but also what you don’t need to say.” In other words, this method is an active attempt to better understand which components play an essential role in the effectiveness of the composition and which may be extraneous. Further, rather than layering paint to gradually accumulate the desired detail within his works, Pendleton has adopted a more direct approach to painting—a shift that has challenged him to slow down and work meticulously, again aiding in a pursuit of continuous upward growth. “[My practice] is not just about illustrating a scene,” Pendleton explains, “it’s about creating a sort of visual poetry where part of the appreciation of the paintings is just viewing them [for their abstract qualities]—looking at the passages of paint that have been laid down and appreciating [the works] sheerly on a level of color and form.”

Douglas Pendleton: After Party is on view from March 4 through April 26, 2023 at Louis Buhl & Co.