Opening Reception Thursday, December 20th 2007
Joe Becker
THE AGE OF THE SWINE
&
Peggy Kouroumalos
THE TWELVE MONTHS
Opening Reception: Thursday December 20th, 6pm – 10pm
Exhibition runs until: February 2
Christopher Cutts Gallery, 21 Morrow Avenue, Toronto, ON, M6R 2H9
The Christopher Cutts Gallery is pleased to present two exhibitions of new work, by Joe Becker and Peggy Kouroumalos respectively. The opening reception for the two exhibitions coincides with a small Yuletide soiree, taking place at the gallery on Thursday December 20th from 6pm – 10pm
Joe Becker is a young artist with a brazen love of traditional painting. He uses vintage processes including rabbit skin glue and the mixing of raw pigments to make epic oil paintings on mahogany board. His inspiration draws from 17th and 18th century Flemish and French painting. This, his newest body of work entitled The Age of the Swine, references classic works by Frans Snyders, Paul De Vos, Jan Weenix, Jean Baptiste Greuze, and others, with appearances by characters from contemporary art and pop-culture. Becker liberally pillages characters, compositions, and whole scenes from antiquity replacing the Romanticism with his own fiendish gore-hound tendency. This is raw brutish painting seething with exaggerated neo-classical manliness, resulting in wonderfully self-indulgent masterpieces that reflect as both tribute and parody. Becker revels in visual excess and all round swinery, the work overflows with gothic spectacle and corporeal horror, reeking with guileless post-postmodern wit and whimsy. Debauched mutants deal in stock piles of corpses, bloody puss and slime. These breathtaking canvases crawl with baroque disease. The mysterious giant slugs, moist and glistening like gargantuan genitalia are just the tip of the psychosexual iceberg of utterly fantastical gore.
Peggy Kouroumalos’ The Twelve Months, portrays each of the months of the year in seasonal landscape, echoing the tradition of calendar painting. Each work features representations of nymphs and folkloric, fairytale beauties posed like pinup girls doing cheesecake in front of beautifully rendered landscapes in the Dutch tradition. Each subject is ripe with sensuality, blushing with innocence and desire.
Of additional interest, these two artists are involved in a relationship, they live together, and share a studio, good and evil working together, beauty and the beast creating back to back. Becker’s cartoonishly violent maleness, his oafish brutes and his docile lobotomized females are answered and almost neutralized by Peggy Kouroumalos‘ puissant coquettish bombshells and milkmaids fearlessly returning the gaze. Both artists create their own lush dream-worlds rich in history and imagery, some pretty, some hideous, all beautiful. These are young artists genuinely in love with painting, this is the first solo show for both of these virtually undiscovered gems.
Joe Becker b.1978 is a young painter based in Toronto. He graduated the Ontario College of Art & Design in 2003. He was recently commissioned to paint large-scale murals for the illustrious and portentous Drake Hotel. Of his work The Globe & Mail said “is this where painting is headed, I certainly hope not.”
Peggy Kouroumalos b.1979 is a young painter based in Toronto, she graduated the Ontario College of Art & Design in 2006. This is her first major exhibition.
Joe Becker and Peggy Kouroumalos are represented by Christopher Cutts Gallery in Toronto, Canada. Additional information and publication-quality digital image files are available by calling Christopher Cutts, Laura Horne, or Jubal Brown at the gallery at 416-532-5566. The Gallery can also be reached by email at info@cuttsgallery.com.
