If Fantasies Came By The Gallon, This Baby Could Run Forever

Leo Koenig Inc. is pleased to announce the opening of a solo exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Bill Saylor.

For this exhibition, Saylor continues to meld together a profuse and varied imagery of the mechanical and the organic, high and low, sublime and ludicrous, which results in an intoxicating hybrid. Frenetic environments arise from the artist navigating freely between gestural brushwork, alternatingly rough and detailed drawing, text, collage, and incongruous sculpture that is meant to be considered as a whole.

Saylor often begins with notational drawings that have evolved into a highly personalized shorthand and anchoring force for his paintings and sculptures. In the canvases, superficial links to an abstract expressionist past are in evidence, however, in the artists hand, the confrontational machismo that ab-ex was known for, is subverted through unlikely juxtapositions, humorous text and collages. There also seems to be a continuing effort to re-code the visual bombardment of contemporary city life into a dialogue with gestural painting. For all the initial chaos that is recorded by the eye however, a teetering cohesion emerges.

In the past, Saylor’s work has been described as being tuned in to a particularly American iconography. With this in mind, in his new sculptures, Saylor is in effect memorializing an imminent “dinosaur,” the V8 high performance engine. These striking relics have been transformed into colorful pop-elegies for a soon to be bygone era, while offering a glimpse to a potential future, mutating forms into a playful and eloquent mechanical/biological amalgam. As the title suggests, “if fantasies came by the gallon, this baby could run forever…

Bill Saylor has exhibited internationally and has been included in such shows as The Peanut Gallery, curated by Joe Bradley, Journal Gallery, Brooklyn NY, Kults, Werewolves and Sarcastic Hippies, Yerba Buena Art Center, San Francisco, CA., and Contemporary Painters; curated by Alex Katz, Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME. He has recently been selected for the Chinati Foundation artist residency in Marfa TX. He lives and works in NYC.