Illiterate Opening: Jason Appleton Saturday, June 5
On Saturday June 5, Illiterate welcomes the prolific artist Jason Appleton to the gallery for a solo exhibition of new works. After a self imposed art world hiatus, Appleton emerges to unleash the culmination of these years spent honing new developments in his energetic art, including multiple new series. With the capacity for both the visceral and the refined, Appleton has suffered no lack of expressive outlets during his time in gallery exile. From a staggering mass of small evocatively stroked hand-drawn and painted cards, to large brightly hued and tightly executed abstract canvases, the artist's much sought after decorated ceramics, and an entirely new evolution of process, in which paint, the very medium for color, breaks into the third dimension, Jason Appleton surfaces at Illiterate to reveal the vibrancy of his myriad creative pursuits.
About the Artist
Combining the properties of expressive line work and careful coloring famously investigated by the great Modern artists of the early 20th century with the repetitive image-making of Pop Art, Appleton creates powerful contemporary symbols of Dionysian sensuality. Raised in upstate New York, Appleton is a self proclaimed autodidactic. Foregoing formal academic education, he found his first instructors in the great painters within the pages of historical art books. Later while in high school, young Appleton discovered and grew to admire the power of Pop art through Andy Warhol and the young primal art scene surrounding 1980's New York. Moving to Denver in 1993 at the age of 19, Appleton decided to take his creative inclinations and pursue a career as an artist. Exhibiting extensively within the Queen city, he has gained recognition for the monumental and the minute, creating giant scale canvases and staggering ceramics built up through a consensus of intricate details. Often exploring the male and female form, his instinctual paintings contain both subtle and uninhibited sexual energy, reflecting the inner tension within modern man-- to create, to appreciate and yes, to procreate.
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