Jo Fish, Breaking Concrete: Ketabi Bourdet - 22, passage Dauphine, 75006 Paris
Overview
The artist in front of one of her painting
The artist in front of one of her painting
Galerie Ketabi Bourdet is delighted to dedicate a first exhibition to American artist Jo Fish.
Ketabi Bourdet is pleased to introduce its first exhibition of American artist Jo Fish. Originally from Michigan, Jo Fish now lives in New York City where she has benefited from several residency programs. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in the United States (Detroit, New York City...etc) as well as locations such as Argentina (Buenos Aires). For the first time, her work will be shown in France on this occasion, after being highlighted on the gallery's stand at the Art Paris art fair this year. Breaking Concrete presents the artist's most recent work, which is centered on figurative painting, through a series of oils on canvas and oil pastel drawings.

The representation of the body and its idiom is at the heart of the artist's work - she surrounds her figures with objects that are as tangible as they are unusual. Jo Fish's paintings prove to hold their ground as their own subject. The artist blends the traditional elements of portraiture(human figure, background, symbolic details) into an experimental imagery that blurs the form, content and purpose of composition. Thus, just as the canvas is a vehicle for the deployment of multiple gestures and painting patterns, it is the elasticity of the body, yielding to all contortions, that interests the artist, stemming from her background as an athlete. Jo Fish finds inspiration in the semi-abstract world of De Kooning, where anthropomorphic forms are entangled with an underlying network of layers of paint.

The artist's work is also closely tied to collage: this combination of techniques is both the source and the subject of the interlocking, disjointed and literally patched together silhouettes. Vigorous strokes, flat surfaces with transparency, gradations, motifs, geometric volumes and chromatic fades exacerbate the effects of contrast, while ensuring there are still spaces left for the eye to breathe. This pictorial explosion confers a raw, primitive quality where characters echo the radicalism of Baselitz's painted sculptures, the gesture both acrobatic in nature and in content along with the freedom of proportions refer to Picasso's cubism (in particular that of the "Bathers" to which the sportswear present in the drawings is also reminiscent).

Through the zones of emptiness and fullness, a spatial arrangement can be simply and effectively suggested by a few powerful lines or colored surfaces, playing with the idea of perspective. Some details allude to a room, a place or a time, with a refreshing simplicity.

In these different approaches there is also a desire to control certain areas of painting, more detailed and refined, while leaving others to a random, vaporous, gestural rendering. In the same way, behind the precision of the painted objects hides the desire to let each of us appropriate the work as we please. Jo Fish is therefore in line with surrealism, from which she draws her taste for the incongruous, the enigmatic and the symbolic. A pizza, the astonishing recurrence of a flower pot, a ketchup bottle and a banana, mark these many banal and universal elements which appear with a surprising naturalness.

Jo Fish reveals the athletic potential of the bodies at the same time as that of figurative painting, which she maximizes, twists and questions. Her work is informed by numerous pictorial references which, rather than weighing her down, feed her originality. 

E. Pion
 
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