James Esber

James Esber uses a variety of media to disassemble and distort the emotionally charged and often clichéd images of Americana, prodding figuration toward abstraction. The characters he’s drawn to, pawed-over icons of popular culture, include things like gunslingers, flag-wavers, dimpled children holding flowers, and tattooed hipsters. His paintings, built through a process of hyperbolic mark-making, are done with myopic focus on each part, shifting between scales and allowing for improvised digressions which turn bodies and faces into abstracted landscapes of meandering marks.

Esber has shown his work in New York and beyond, including a 25-year survey at the Clifford Gallery at Colgate University (2014) and a solo exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT (2011). He has had multiple one-person shows at PPOW, NYC, Bernard Toale in Boston, and Pierogi in both New York and Leipzig. He has also shown widely in group exhibitions, including ASKEW at D.C. Moore Gallery (2022), Flex at the Tang Museum (2020), Now What? at The Norton Museum of Art (2011), and SITE Santa Fe’s Fifth International Biennial: Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque (2004).