Joel Tomlin & Morris Graves

Opening Reception:
• Saturday, May 20, 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Exhibition Dates:
* May 20 – June 25

Blunk Space is pleased to present Joel Tomlin & Morris Graves, an exhibition of Tomlin’s new sculptures and Graves’s paintings from the 1940s.

The works in this exhibition spark a conversation between past and present and allude to Arcadian worlds and inner visions that share a vocabulary of symbolism – cups, chalices, birds, moons, and flowers. Tomlin and Graves’s works are curiously familiar; some of the forms and compositions recall Egyptian, Greek, and African art, but their scale and surface treatments are truly original.

Morris Graves (1910–2001) was a Modernist artist from the Pacific Northwest described by critic Clement Greenberg in 1945 as “one of the most original American painters.” His paintings depict natural and human-made forms – birds, trees, flowers, vessels – and creatures of the imagination, abstract shapes from the “sky of the mind”.

The two paintings on view are from the Lucid Art Foundation’s collection and are a fascinating synthesis of diverse elements inspired by the wild and remote pacific Northwest and by the geographically adjacent Asian cultures, specifically Japan. Graves adopted a technique of applying tempera and gouache on thin Japanese or Chinese paper. The implements and processes of the craft were of utmost importance to him. The hand of the artist is always evident.

Like Graves, London-based artist Tomlin finds the natural world to be a special source of personally expressive forms that in his work assume an almost spiritual meaning. Tomlin is an avid walker, and he uses salvaged materials sourced from the River Thames and the backstreets of London’s East End to compose his sculptures.

His sculptures have what he describes as “conversational attributes”, a sense of one work communicating with another, or relationships building between things. The works encourage an anthropomorphic reading, especially in the arrangement of multiple objects, and his creations look like they could have emerged from one of Grave’s paintings.