GEORGE STOLL: sacred and profane

Kim Light /LightBox is pleased to present sacred and profane, an exhibition of new sculpture and drawing by Los Angeles-based artist George Stoll. Stoll's objects have long catalogued American arcana from Tupperware to toilet paper to holiday memorabilia. In his new work he brings his domestic American sensibility to bear on subjects more familiar from the landscape of Italian art and the vernacular of crypts, chapels, reliquaries and x-votos.

From among the innumerable products that populate our lives, Stoll's choice of models stems from a refined subculture of consumption. sacred and profane focuses on store-bought items that—although inexpensive and common—have particularities of character that stimulate nostalgia, and breathe presence into their second lives as sculptures and drawings. In fact, it is a prevalent interpretation that Stoll's lovingly rendered works are animated by the techniques of portraiture, seeking to accentuate the enduring traits of the model.

The artist carefully selects his subjects from cultural assemblages such as holidays, novelty shops, and the domestic front. They are suggestive of metonymical readings-- a sculpture of stacked jack-o-lanterns (modeled after plastic trick-or-treating pails) is a standing for all that is Halloween, conjuring the bowl of candy, the sound of a doorbell, the autumn air. But with its stark monochromatic surface, it also merges the childhood impulse to stack toys in orderly arrangements with Stoll's minimalist propensity to do the same.

The gallery of nature morte sculptures are patently un-lifelike plaster replicas comically abstract bones, skulls, and oversized ears and noses. There is a reverential quality to their treatment of these curios. They seem modeled with the high seriousness of 17th century Baroque sculpture in marble, with their bleach-white surfaces and gently handled curves and crevices. Hung and mounted with the care of sacred reliquary, these sculptures affect an inner life; born of the exchange between a vernacular of suburban American rituals, Roman Catholicism, and handicraft.

Stoll's trademark Tupperware tumblers also find their way from the kitchen counter to hallowed ground. In a sculptural installation that draws on the translucency of the beeswax and paraffin cups to affect the play of light in a stained-glass window, we also find a connection to the aesthetic practices of California Light and Space. In another continuing project, Stoll's architectural drawings reveal the soft-focus twinkle from strings of Christmas lights, cropped by crisp geometric “windows” lifted from architectural details and from paintings—notice the contour of the undulating floor plan of Borromini's Sant Ivo chapel, the triangular pediment of the Parthenon, the detail from John Soan's tomb. Again and again in surprising combinations, we find the profane wrapped in the sacred, and the sacred celebrated by the profane.

George Stoll lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited extensively and he has had numerous solo exhibitions, including Baldwin Gallery, Aspen; Angles, Los Angeles; Grant Selwyn Fine Art, New York; Gallery Seomi, Seoul; Windows Gallery, Brussels; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Boston; and The Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati. Stoll's works have appeared in group exhibitions internationally, including Cheim & Read, New York; American Academy in Rome, Biagiotti Progetto Arte, Florence; Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and The Drawing Center, New York. Public collections include the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; Norton Family Collection; The Robert J. Shiffler Collection; and the Williams - Sonoma Collection.