Shulamit Nazarian is currently featuring An Egg in Your Shoe, the gallery’s first solo exhibition by UK-based painter Dickon Drury. The artist’s thematically rich, meticulously detailed paintings mine diverse corners of art history and the genre of still-life painting to delve into themes of self-sufficiency, preservation, and regeneration with tenderness and humor.
Dickon Drury, Flowers for Alfred Wallis, 2023. Oil on Flax, 70 ¾ x 47 ¼ in. Courtesy of the artist and Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles.
Drury's latest series of oil paintings on linen invites viewers to contemplate the complex relationship between material possessions and a sense of home amid an uncertain future. The still lives present collections of objects that work like visual puzzles, prodding the viewer to piece together clues about the mysterious inhabitants of these scenes. Drury's practice seeks the humor and idiosyncrasy embodied in our selection of material possessions, and his research has often looked to the supplies collected by apocalypse preppers. Boxes in the process of being packed or unpacked evoke a sense of urgency and an impending move, while rolls of bubble wrap allude to themes of protection and value for one's beloved objects. The compositions present their diverse groupings of objects democratically, without a hierarchical division between a whistle, a lighter, or a high-end ceramic vase. Without a human figure in sight, Drury's paintings offer an imaginative narrative played out in the background by the invisible, implicit inhabitants of his eccentric world.
Dickon Drury, Worm Food, 2023. Oil on Flax, 63 x 47 ¼ in. Courtesy of the artist and Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles.
An Egg in Your Shoe is on view through October 28 @ Shulamit Nazarian, 616 N La Brea Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90036
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