Fitzroy Gallery is pleased to announce Pastiche Cicero, an exhibition by New York artist Timothy Hull. This is his first solo exhibition at the gallery.
Pastiche Cicero is an aesthetic field trip undergoing an archeological dig. Featuring lyrical and graphic motifs from antiquity and the contemporary, the exhibition is comprised of new highly textured oil paintings; densely detailed blue gel pen drawings; bold, colorful minimal wall murals; and readymade sculptural elements.
Hull's source material is the written detritus of disregarded, disintegrated wall graffiti, ruins, incidental letters and pictures from the walls of Pompeii and the Athenian Agora. This visual vocabulary evidences the entropy of language with work that is conservative and subversive, Classical yet cheeky.
The work explores ideas of representation, reproduction, cultural appropriation and recycling. Hull's paintings of Greco-Roman vessels, ruins, scribbles and scratches of undetermined meaning are fetishistic and laborious in terms of the physical application of the paint while Hull's flat wall silhouettes of palm trees and phallic urns are automatic, playful and decidedly perverse.Sculptural elements include reproduction Jasperware vases (often seen in museum gift shops and Greek diners) and a urinal installation with homoerotic graffiti entitled "Reel Around the Fountain" that winks at Duchamp and Morrissey.
In conjunction with Pastiche Cicero, Hull has created a limited edition black and white Xeroxed publication. Also available is a related florilegium by Jeffrey Doolittle, PhD candidate, Medieval Studies, Fordham University.
Timothy Hull was born in 1979. He received his B.A. from New York University in 2002 and his M.F.A. from Parsons School of Design in 2006. His monumental public sculpture, "The Accelerated Ruin", commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music to commemorate the institution's 150th anniversary, was erected in 2012 and degraded over the course of several months. He has been included in exhibitions at the Tate Modern, London, FRAC Lorraine, Metz, and the Morris Museum of Art, Morristown. Hull lives and works in Brooklyn and Warwick.