A Hug From The Art World is pleased to announce
Llyn Foulkes: The Untied State of America
The exhibition has been timed to open five days prior to the 2024 US election.
This Halloween, Thursday, October 31st, 2024, A Hug From The Art World will host a reception in celebration from 6-8pm at 515 West 19th St, New York, NY 10011.
I have been fascinated by the work of Llyn Foulkes for many years. Not an artist I came to easily, being born in the north of England in 1980. Even with a keen interest in art, Foulkes was not taught in English Art Schools. Ed Kienholz, however, was and his version of the aesthetics of America and specifically Los Angeles led me to the work of Foulkes. It’s no coincidence Foulkes began exhibiting at The Ferus Gallery of Kienholz’s founding, his first solo exhibition opening in 1961.
Great art finds its way across cultures. And the word cult comes from the same Latin root as the word culture. It is fair to say Llyn Foulkes has a cult following, a pioneer in the formation of the Los Angeles art scene. He is a real (American) cult hero.
My first trip to Los Angeles was in 1992, and I recall going down Melrose as a twelve-year-old and walking into a place called “Off the Wall”. They sold all sorts of American bric-a-brac, Coca-Cola machines from the 1930s, Wurlitzer Jukeboxes from the 1940s and old signs from the 1950s. I was immediately seduced by its wonder.
My Grandfather had a similar store in Manchester, England, selling a sort of British equivalent. The smell was similar but different; objects a whole century earlier had a fustier aroma, the objects being ‘Colonial’ or ‘Victorian’ certainly made them less colorful than their US counterparts, yet they were still arranged eerily giving the impression of significance.
Now with the benefit of hindsight I have come to realize they both evoked the same feeling beyond nostalgia, the feeling of what I call ‘Fallen Empire Syndrome’.
More recently, I have read Edward Bernays’ 1928 book titled Propaganda and watched Adam Curtis’s 2002 documentary, The Century of the Self. Both are deep examinations about the rise of psychoanalysis as a powerful means of persuasion for both governments and corporations, and how it later helped influence the contemporary society and marketing.
Curtis says his film is about how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy.
Llyn Foulkes observes a Schizophrenic Propaganda which is indigenous to The United States of America. There is often an undercurrent in the imagery of the artist’s choosing, which has the potential to seep into the minds of the individual and the collective American psyche at large.
The exhibition is split over a number of floors.
The Untied State of America is comprised of painting, sculptures, assemblage and mixed media works produced by Foulkes in the last decade from 2014 to 2024, on the parlor floor.
His subjects are jarring, highly charged, wickedly confrontational icons of America’s creation.
Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump, Richard Nixon, Pat Nixon, Teddy Roosevelt, Weapons, War, Race, Racism, Faith, Power, Control, Migration and the great American Landscape.
The exhibition is not for the faint hearted, Foulkes’s mordant, social commentary consistently targets human cruelty and challenges the excesses of corporate America, particularly the Walt Disney Corporation.
Outtakes on the floor above focuses on works that have not until now been made available for consumption.
A grouping of ten works on paper ‘cartoons’ made in 1949, over seventy-five years ago, and under the pseudonym Spike are the earliest works in the exhibition. They remind me of Philip Guston’s Nixon drawings made in 1971-75.
Another grouping of four surrealist works on paper from 1953 look like they could easily have influenced the work of any number of major CAL Arts alumni such Mike Kelley and/or Tim Burton, while the painting The Images of Perception (1953) seems like a nod to Giorgio de Chirico.
When visiting Foulkes’s Los Angeles, Lincoln Heights studio for the first time this February, I burst through the doors and was shown around. Pretty quickly I was led upstairs to Llyn’s living room and in a state of overwhelmed excitement I found it hard to contain my enthusiasm. The rooms’ walls were decked full of American oddities. I was immediately transported back to “Off the Wall” and to my Grandpa’s place in Manchester, Fallen Empire Syndrome galore.
Yet this was better, the room Llyn’s very own cabinet of curiosity. I felt like I had just entered John Soane’s home, all the while trapped inside a Joseph Cornell box.
I turned to Jordan, Llyn’s studio manager, and said “this has to be in the show, this is the show.”
After a lot of back and forth, yeses and nos and then more nos and again more nos, somehow my persistence paid off and I now have the privilege of showing this very important architectural installation, Llyn’s storyboard to his life’s work - possibly his greatest work. It’s a Masterpiece.
The room assembled over a six-decade period, began in Eagle Rock in 1967, growing and traveling with him to Topanga Canyon and since 1997 housed in his current location in Lincoln Heights.
Everything is here! If you are a Llyn Foulkes fan, be prepared to geek out. And if you are not familiar then this an opportunity to see the museology of an artist represented in the collections of every major Museum you can think of across America and Europe. The Francois Pinault collection has 23.
The exhibition spans nine decades, from 1949 to 2024.
Mickey Hand (2024) the artist’s hand as Mickey Mouse has been fabricated specially for the exhibition. It’s a self-portrait and has been cast in four unique patinaed versions.
And just in case you did not get your fill, below the parlor on the ground floor, there will be a number of previously unexhibited work by Foulkes, along with some of the classic Blood Heads and works making cutting references to Disney, Foulkes’ long time bete noir.
The exhibition will be on view until the end of the year.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Llyn Foulkes was born in Yakima, Washington, in 1934, and lives and works in Los Angeles. Collections include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art; Exhibitions include the Pasadena Art Museum (1962); Oakland Art Museum (1964); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1967); Newport Harbor Art Museum (1974); Between a Rock and a Hard Place, Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA (1995–96, traveled to Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; Oakland Museum of California; Neuberger Museum of Art, State University of New York, Purchase, NY; and Palm Springs Desert Museum, 1996–98), and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013). Foulkes participated in the IX Bienal de São Paulo (1967) and Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany (2012), and won the Prize for Painting at the Biennale de Paris in 1967. As a musician, he has played drums with City Lights (1965–71) and The Rubber Band (1973–77), and currently performs as one-man band The Machine.