Ampersand is pleased to present Chaos Hat, a group exhibition of works on paper populated by colorful masks, distorted faces, perverse nudes and fetish-like figures. The show features work by four artists who simplify, distort or violently render the human figure and face to make characters that are singular to each artist not only in form and feature, but also in the style and methodology of their creation. The selection of linocut masks by German artist Christoph Ruckhäberle emerged from his first large collaboration with graphic designer and printer Thomas Siemon, with whom he later started Lubok Verlog, a publishing imprint focused on graphic books made with original linocuts and screen prints, many titles from which are available through Ampersand. "The masks were not only an investigation of portraits and heads, which I also started painting at the time, but also the possibilities of Siemon's printshop and the linocut technique. The strong colors and necessary simplifications influenced my painting, which became bolder and more direct." His interest in masks led him to investigate African art and use the texture of crayon on a grained stone to "sculpt" the fetish figures we see in his lithographs from 2007. Like Ruckhäberle, the idea of fetish objects plays a key role in much of Mark Mulroney's work, but his patterns are less exact, the humor is more ribald and the sexuality is quite overt. In two large drawings, made up of joined sheets of antique paper, we are confronted by grinning female faces, one graphic in execution, the other like a human skull except for its bulbous lips and wide eyes. Both emerge from a pattern whose apparent symmetry is broken by patches of thick, violent lines, as though the finsishing move was to make it slightly imperfect. His smaller drawings of women seem to fetishize the breasts, which are strange and exaggerated like a Tom of Finland, whom Mulroney sights as an influence along with Dekooning. Or maybe the eyes are the focus of worship, large and flower-like, the starting point for each of his drawings. There is also an echo if Dekooning in Anthony Miler's paintings on paper, in which, he says, there is a concerted effort to engage in dirtiness. This is a physical rather than a conceptual position, meaning that dirtiness does not describe the image we see but instead the method of its making, a visceral and at times violent mixing of materials. His large works are suggestive of human forms, but looked at askance become a mingling of abstracted line and shape. A series of eight smaller works recreates the same female face over and over in a multitude of media, by degrees horrific and demented but always flirting with the idea of beauty. As opposed to dirtiness, the series of drawings made by Christopher Davison in summer 2013 deliberately engage in artifice, both in terms of the point of imagination from which each emerge and the compositional devices around which each drawing is made. More generally, his work is a reflection of an interest in the mystery of death and rebirth and all it's various sexual guises. His women seem embedded in a cosmological moment, whether that's represented by constellations, a set of floating random numbers or lined shapes that evidently translate an undefined mental state.

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Untitled, 2006
Linocut
27 1/2 x 19 3/4 in.
Edition of 20
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