Devin Troy Strother’s recent paintings were inspired by the loose style, autobiographic content, and raucous energy of Philip Guston’s paintings from the last decade of his life. In many of these works, an actual cat shows up as a stand-in/avatar for African-American ‘cool cat’ characters who smoke, go to jazz clubs, play music, and take on the town. Sax Cat is a subversively comic work, depicting the main character with thick daubs of paint and mounds of lines squirted right out of the paint tube. Strother’s work is in the public collections of LACMA, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara; The Studio Museum, Harlem; and Torrance Art Museum, Torrance.
