Steve Turner Contemporary is pleased to present Fancy Wonder Free, a solo exhibition by James Gobel featuring work created during the past year inspired by German New Objectivity artists Otto Dix and Christian Schad. Riffing on these artists and the political and social atmosphere of the 1920s and 1930s, Gobel portrays "Bears" (large, bearded gay men) in both social settings and as solitary figures, depicting his subjects not in paint but in felt and yarn. Some compositions refer directly to Dix or Schad; other references are more nuanced. This is Gobel's second show at Steve Turner Contemporary.
Born in 1972 in Portland, Oregon, James Gobel received his BFA at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (1996) and his MFA at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1999). Gobel has had solo exhibitions at the UCLA Hammer Museum (2000); Kravets/Wehby Gallery, New York (1999, 2001, 2002, 2005); Marx & Zavattero, San Francisco (2008, 2010) and Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles (2008). Recent museum exhibitions include Surface Value, Des Moines Art Center, (2011); The Mysterious Content of Softness, Rough Edges and Loose Ends, Bellevue Arts Museum, Washington (2011); Embodying, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta (2011); Pattern ID, Akron Art Museum (2011); Underground Pop, Parrish Art Museum, New York (2010); Las Vegas Diaspora: The Emergence of Contemporary Art from the Neon Homeland, Las Vegas Art Museum (2007) and The Altoids Curiously Strong Collection, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2005).