Dike Blair

MATINEE: DIke Blair

On view Friday, June 21- Sunday, October 27, 2024
Opening Reception: June 21, 5-7pm

On Friday, June 21, 2024, the Edward Hopper House Museum & Study Center, Nyack, NY, is pleased to open an exhibition of work by Dike Blair. Prompted by Hopper’s fascination with the cinematic, MATINEE: DIKE BLAIR explores Blair’s use of the filmic concept of mise-en-scène in his paintings, which, for the past forty years, he has based on his own intimate point-and-shoot photographs. As in cinema–particularly the moody vignettes of film noir–light is a character in its own right in the work of both artists, whether casting an eerie pallor on a vacant interior or illuminating the lip of a half-drunk glass.

Installation photographs by Iain McDonald, Copyright @ Dike Blair, All images courtesy of Karma.

Like Hopper, who drew inspiration from his frequent trips to the movie theater, Blair's works imply narratives without offering definitive plots. Blair’s works are installed at Edward Hopper House Museum so they unfold sequentially, inviting the viewer to stitch together a story from images and absences. MATINEE: DIKE BLAIR foregrounds the “realism” of Blair and Hopper within the context of the utter irreality of the movies, leaving the viewer to marvel in the liminal state between fact and fiction, narrative and pictures.

Dike Blair, Untitled, 2021, oil on aluminum 8 x 6 in. (20.3 x 15.2 cm)

Dike Blair, Untitled, 2021, Charcoal, oil, gouache, gesso on paper, 20 1/8 x 15 1/8 in. (50.8 x 38.1 cm)

Dike Blair, Untitled, 2021, Oil on aluminum, 16 x 12 in. (40.6 x 30.5 cm)

MATINEE: DIKE BLAIR is the most recent contribution to a developing body of scholarship linking the two realists, which most notably includes the work of art historian Robert Hobbs, who in 2022 organized an exhibition of Hopper and Blair’s paintings of the small town of Gloucester, Massachusetts at Karma New York. Like Hobbs wrote of Hopper, Blair’s “works depend on ellipses, on the missing parts of a narrative, and on the presence of a viewer who is assumed within the fictive realm of the painting and made a reality by the actual people who look at the work of art.” Visitors to MATINEE: DIKE BLAIR are participants in the project of making these fictions real.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a forthcoming (September 2024) illustrated catalog that includes a conversation between Helen Molesworth and Dike Blair that takes as its jumping-off point Hopper’s iconic painting New York Movie (1939). Carried out while the curator and artist sat in front of Hopper’s iconic painting of a movie palace interior at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, their discussion proceeds from their thoughts about Brian O’Doherty’s 2004 essay “Hopper’s Look” to the similarities and differences between Blair’s and Hopper’s practices. The catalog is illustrated with all twenty-one works in the exhibition which date from 1997 to the present.

Installation photographs by Iain McDonald, Copyright @ Dike Blair, All images courtesy of Karma.

Dike Blair, photo courtesy Karma Gallery

DIKE BLAIR

Dike Blair (b. 1952, New Castle, Pennsylvania) uses gouache, oil, his own photographs, and strategies appropriated from Postminimalist sculpture to create intimate tableaux that transform quotidian sights and materials into exercises in formalism. A writer and teacher as well as an artist, Blair came up in the downtown scene of 1970s New York among punk rockers and Postmodernists. In the early 1980s, against prevailing art world trends toward Neo-Expressionism, he began rendering scenes from his life in gouache on paper. These ongoing diaristic paintings are devoid of human figures but nonetheless evoke the specter of the artist whose daily life plays out at a remove across their finely-wrought surfaces. Blair’s practice toes the line between the Pictures generation, the environments of Dan Graham, and the travel documentation of Stephen Shore. The artist lives in New York.

Blair’s recent solo exhibitions include Karma (Los Angeles, 2023, New York, 2022); Various Small Fires, Seoul (2020); The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2019); Linn Lühn, Düsseldorf (2019); Secession, Vienna (2016); and Jüergen Becker Gallery, Hamburg (2016). In 2022, Karma presented an exhibition of Blair’s paintings of Gloucester alongside Edward Hopper’s paintings of the same small Massachusetts city. Blair’s work is featured in the collections of the Whitney Museum, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others.

Helen Molesworth, photo by Christopher Witkin

HELEN MOLESWORTH

Helen Molesworth is a writer, podcaster, and curator based in Los Angeles and Provincetown. In 2023 Phaidon published Open Questions, Thirty Years of Writing About Art, an anthology of her essays. Her podcasts include Death of an Artist a 6-part podcast about the intertwined fates of Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta and the inaugural season of Recording Artists with The Getty. She is also the host of DIALOGUES, a podcast that features interviews with artists, writers, fashion designers, and filmmakers hosted by the David Zwirner Gallery. Her major museum exhibitions include: One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art; Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957; Dance/Draw; This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s; Part Object Part Sculpture, and Work Ethic. She has organized one-person exhibitions of Ruth Asawa, Moyra Davey, Noah Davis, Louise Lawler, Steve Locke, Anna Maria Maiolino, Josiah McElheny, Kerry James Marshall, Catherine Opie, Amy Sillman, and Luc Tuymans. She is the author of numerous catalogue essays and her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, Documents, and October. The recipient of the 2011 Bard Center for Curatorial Studies Award for Curatorial Excellence, in 2021 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2022 she was awarded The Clark Art Writing Prize.

"Dike Blair: Matinee" A conversation between Dike Blair and Helen Molesworth

The catalog for our current exhibition, "MATINEE: DIKE BLAIR," features a conversation between Dike Blair and Helen Molesworth that takes, as its jumping-off point, Hopper’s New York Movie (1939), along with images of the show at the Edward Hopper House Museum. This conversation, carried out while the curator and artist sat in front of Hopper’s iconic painting of a movie palace interior at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, proceeds from their thoughts about Brian O’Doherty’s 2004 essay “Hopper’s Look” to the similarities and differences between Blair’s and Hopper’s practices.

"Dike Blair: Matinee" is on sale in our Museum shop for $30.00 (member discount 10%). It is not currently available online. If you cannot make an in-person purchase, you may inquire by email [email protected], or call the Museum to purchase: 845-358-0774. (Shipping $12, international shipping determined by location.)

MATINEE: DIKE BLAIR was conceived of by Helen Molesworth and is made possible, in part, by funding provided to the Edward Hopper House Museum & Study Center by the New York Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

The health and well-being of our visitors, our community, and our team are important to us. Edward Hopper House Museum & Study Center is compliant with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), New York State Department of Health (DOH) and local guidelines.