Van Der Plas Gallery presents Let the light live, a Justin Duerr solo exhibition, running from September 27th to Sunday, October 20th. The show is taking place at the gallery’s Lower East Side location in Manhattan, with an opening exhibition on Friday, October 4th from 6pm to 8pm. Featuring a selection of autobiographical interlocking, hand-drawn scrolls that Justin has been working on for more than two decades, this will be his first ever show in New York City and his first solo show since 2020.

Born in rural Pennsylvania in 1976, Duerr dropped out of high school at 17 and moved to Philadelphia, living in squats and playing in punk bands. He worked many odd jobs over the years, including several seasons on a fishing boat in Alaska. It was at sea where he experienced what he calls an “ecstatic vision” that gave him the idea to start creating the scrolls. Begun in the summer of 2000, the project is currently well over a hundred feet in length. Duerr hopes to connect the final panel to the first at the end of his life, creating a cycloramic image encompassing his entire lifespan.

In a recent article in Raw Vision magazine, critic Tom Patterson described Duerr’s art as mapping out “stretches of a vast, complex network, interweaving people, places and events over long spans of time” with “fluidly geometric, horror-vacui structures”. His unique works, awash with color and detail, are as impressive as they are beautiful.

The title of a recent notebook-sized drawing, Let the light live was chosen by Duerr as the name for the exhibit as a reminder that light – in both the literal and metaphoric sense – is always going to be there as a counterpoint to darkness. When faced with seemingly never-ending threats of war, of pandemics, of fascism, it’s important to know that the light is still there and can be welcomed and nurtured.

Since the 90s, Duerr has been part of exhibitions both national and international including a solo show at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago in 2019/2020. He is the author of three books including The temple of silence: forgotten worlds of Herbert Crowley, about the early 20th century visionary cartoonist. He is currently at work on a two-volume biography of artist, bookshop owner, publisher, and landscape architect Mary Mowbray-Clarke, as well as a volume collecting the work of artist and author Sidney H. Sime.

Duerr was featured in the 2011 documentary Resurrect dead: the mystery of the Toynbee tiles, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won that year’s award for best director. The film has gone on to be seen by at least a million people in the ensuing years. In addition to all that, he’s been performing with his band Northern Liberties since 2000, touring around the country and putting out countless records. Their most recent album, Self-dissolving abandoned universe, was recorded by celebrated music engineer Steve Albini in 2022.

As part of the Van Der Plas exhibition, Duerr will be showing work including the aforementioned scrolls as well as standalone works, spanning the artist's lifetime of creative immersion. The spectrum of artwork reaches as far back as 1997,with such pieces as the one done on a diner napkin and others on pages from zines, and runs all the way to the present day with work completed only weeks before the show. Duerr is constantly making and creating and pulling from what feels like an everlasting well of artistic energy.