2019 Catalogue Archive

A quiet, slightly mysterious banality permeates Dike Blair’s work. Often oddly cropped or seen from unorthodox points of view, his paintings hint at their source material – Blair’s own photographs of everyday moments. In this untitled work from 2018, Blair takes on the timeworn art subject of flowers. And yet, the flowers are weirdly cropped and too large for the panel, and the dark background suggests a flash is over-highlighting the petals, causing the background to get lost. It is this quiet awkwardness, a sense of the beautifully mundane, that Blair captures, and that so often comprises our daily lives. Blair was recently the subject of a one-person exhibition at the Secession in Vienna and was included in a group exhibition at LA MoCA. His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; LACMA, Los Angeles; and LA MoCA, Los Angeles, among others.