October 29 - December 10, 2022
Opening Reception: October 29, 4-6pm
Artist Talk: December 10, 11am
Ned Evans’ new exhibition, "Water Bound" was inspired by a near death experience. Hospitalized during the pandemic for sepsis, Evans dreamt of the ocean and heard voices telling him to make these “goofy, naïve works about water.” A life-long surfer, he moved from the San Fernando Valley to Laguna Beach in the late 60s and enrolled at UC Irvine when LA legends Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, Larry Bell and Craig Kauffman were teaching there. As Jamie Brisick has written, Ned was “originally known as a formalist, abstract painter of serious rigor” and it took him “many years before he could allow himself to make work so close to his heart.” Early in his career Ned thought, “You can’t be a surfer. You’ve got to be serious.” But like other artists in LA’s Finish Fetish and Light and Space group, the ability to blend materials and sensibilities of life in the ocean with life in the studio, led to artistic inventions now considered original to California art. Ned’s resin sculptures of drips and pools are a unique and suggestively figurative extension of Peter Alexander’s cubes, while his H20 paintings of simple striped, and patterned seascapes are playful, and fresh, with a flat, abstracted realism not unlike Milton Avery. As Brisick concludes in his essay on Evans, “the work exudes freedom. It curves, twists, splashes, shapeshifts. It gives the feeling of being in flux,” certainly like the ocean he has spent his life in.