May 7 – June 18, 2017

Keith Boadwee & Club Paint

COUNTRY SAD PALETTE MAN

Opening reception Sunday May 7 4-7pm

The Pit is pleased to announce COUNTRY SAD PALETTE MAN, a new solo exhibition by Keith Boadwee & Club Paint.  Club Paint initially started as a collaborative painting project organized and initiated by Keith Boadwee with former students. Over time, Boadwee has taken control of all narrative and aesthetic decisions. The paintings are made using Boadwee's drawings as blue prints. While they are sometimes painted with the help of other hands (Club Paint), more recently they are just as likely to be made solely by Boadwee. Boadwee is best known for his homoerotic photographic self-portraits, and performative enema paintings. As a facet of his on going practice, Keith Boadwee & Club Paint explores similar subjects with a shared sense of humor. For Boadwee, Club Paint is a method for generating and executing ideas at a rapid rate. The exhibition brings together a selection of paintings from 2014 to the present. 

The paintings in COUNTRY SAD PALETTE MAN exude a fast, spontaneous energy.  The works embody playfulness in both narrative and gestural encaustic paint application. Boadwee’s unique sardonic sense of humor is ever present in the works. The works engage with painting’s history both critically and earnestly. A common theme is painters making paintings, or the re-working of compositions by masters. Many works in the exhibition relish in carnality and sexuality, often times presenting humorous scatological narratives. Much like Boadwee’s solo practice, these paintings have a childlike joy in all things sexual, fecal, and phallic, all the while remaining engaged in a critical reflection of art history.

Boadwee would like to express his sincere gratitude to all of the great painters and friends who have contributed to Club Paint over the past decade.

For COUNTRY SAD PALETTE MAN Keith Boadwee has designed a limited edition Pit shirt, which will be available at the opening and our online shop.

Keith Boadwee (B. 1961 Meridian MS) lives and works in Emeryville CA.  He received a BA from UCLA in 1989 and an MFA from UC Berkeley in 2000. He has had solo exhibitions at Shoot the Lobster NYC, Brennan and Griffin NYC, Salzburger Kunstverein Austria (collaborative project with AA Bronson), Hacienda Zurich, Paradise Garage Venice CA, ROCKSBOX Fine Art Portland OR, White Columns NYC, Peres Projects LA, among others. This summer he will have a solo exhibition at Atelier 34 Zero Museum in Brussels. He taught at California College of the Arts from 2004-15 and San Francisco Art Institute from 2005-16 and in the coming year will be teaching at Maine College of Art and U.C San Diego.