Almine Rech Gallery is pleased to present the first exhibition by Jason Fox with the gallery in Brussels.

Jason Fox’s first solo show was held at Feature in New York in the early nineties, just after MoMA’s High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture (the first major exhibition to address “the relationship between modern art and popular and commercial culture.”) and only two years before Mike Kelley organized The Uncanny at the Gemeentemuseum, Arnhem. Fox’s work itself acts as a link between these events, and they in turn allow us to chronologically situate his acts of borrowing from both art history and from record sleeves of the seventies. Although considered as common practice today, this kind of artistic approach was not so widespread at the time.

In a recent interview with artist Joe Bradley, Fox explicits his position: “The early nineties was another death-of-painting period and to be making expressive paintings that had nothing to do with appropriation was going against the tide. […] From the start I was interested in a kind of cyborg/extreme figuration. […] I wanted to blow the figure up and rebuild it in a Frankenstein-ish way. Art history and comics were the body parts.”

Ingenuity and originality are interweaved in a permanent dialogue with the question of the painting itself and with the never ending challenge the artist has set himself to find efficient yet complex formal solutions. His subjects are pretexts for experimentations in form, and Fox not only seems perfectly aware of previous painterly forays made throughout art history but he is also conscious of how images in general can potentially inform the history of painting.