Charlie Alston: The Wind rises

M+B is proud to present The Wind Rises, an exhibition of new works by Charlie Alston. This is the artist's second solo show with the gallery. The exhibition opens at our Doheny space on January 21 and will run through February 18, 2023 with an opening reception on Saturday, January 21 from 6 to 8 pm. 

In Charlie Alston’s studio in Downtown Los Angeles, every available wall and beam has a painting leaning against it. There are so many towering canvases that impromptu rooms have been created in the open studio. Some of the works that are bound together, have only just found their way to each other. With time, their connection has been revealed to themselves. Every canvas is painted independently of one another, but as the paintings evolve, Alston discovers natural conversations between the works. He is open-hearted, always seeking to reach deeper levels of relating with others. For Charlie Alston, life is neither binary, nor homogenous, it’s fractal, integrated, it’s about everything working together, talking and feeling.

Throughout this series he is in conversation with Pop and Abstraction. Pop has been a regular form of discourse in Alston’s paintings as an accessible way to communicate ideas and remove any insecurities viewers might feel when looking at art. Pop, literally meaning “popular,” is a long-storied genre in the United States, where  it repurposed and re-contextualized everyday consumer items to engage with popular culture and the broader American audience. Alston engages with a large spectrum of icons from Bird’s Eye, TWA, and Globe to images and ads pulled from LIFE, Ebony Jr. and Jet Magazine. In digging up these icons from the past and repurposing them, he’s able to examine the systems they stand for. Each symbol, each icon, represents a system, a way of being in the world under which groups of people came together and created communities.