Save the Date! 9/1: La Luz de Jesus 5th Annual Coaster Show – Install Shots! + Harold Fox : Cartwheel Art

Save the Date! 9/1: La Luz de Jesus 5th Annual Coaster Show – Install Shots! + Harold Fox

Posted by Cartwheel Art

La Luz de Jesus Gallery presents its’ Fifth Annual Coaster Show, opening this Friday, September 1 from 8-11 PM. The show contains an incredible amount of works, over 1000 4″ by 4″ pieces, and as you can see from these install pics, it’s also an incredible amount of work to hang! None of these tiny masterpieces by painters, illustrators, animators, tattooists, sculptors, and collage artists, are priced over $250, and many, way, way less!

It’s the Wooden Anniversary of the La Luz de Jesus Coaster Show. What started as a last minute substitution has grown into one of the most anticipated events of the LA Art Scene, now in its fifth year!

We’ve all done it. We’ve sat at the bar, drinking a beer and doodled on a coaster.

But most of us aren’t the extremely skilled painters, illustrators, animators, tattooists, sculptors or collage artists that are featured in this exhibition that takes a love of craft brewing and elevates it to high art.

We produced a custom canvas for some of our favorite gallery folks to do what they do best, and transform a 4″ tondo coaster into museum worthy exhibition pieces.

In the past four exhibitions we’ve had pieces by Ron English and Mark Ryden, given first exhibitions to hundreds of emerging artists and turned a few dozen newcomers into bonafide stars. This year, we’ll again dot our walls with tiny masterpieces priced $250 or less.

Patron’s with a purchase history get the option to buy early–so contact the director for details. Single coaster sales will be open to the general public on opening night.

Whether you love beer or don’t, the art will blow your mind.

Check out the install shots below.

Also on exhibition in the front gallery, will be HAROLD FOX, “So Long and Thanks for All the Fish”

“The pictures I have made try to represent, to some extent, everyone’s experiences in perhaps a surreal or a fantasy form. An ambiance or deja vu familiarity maybe from a dream, or a nightmare and even a reality that exists somewhere. It is the negative experience that is most enduring, at least for me…like sitting down to enjoy your favorite pie only to discover a dead fly on it.

“I hope the viewer enjoys each piece as much as I did creating it. This will be my last art exhibition in Southern California.” — Harold Fox

Harold Fox has enjoyed unprecedented success in his retirement. Each of his previous exhibitions has completely sold out, and so we are sad to announce that this will be his last exhibition in Los Angeles. If you’ve been waiting to add one of his vivid reminiscences of a bygone era to your own art collection, now is the time to do it. If Charles Bukowski used paintbrushes instead of a typewriter, the outcome might look something like this. But there’s also a bit of Steinbeck and Hemingway and a whole lot of Nightmare Alley. Like a skid row Robert Williams, or a sideshow Frank Cassara, Fox’s work is both cartooned, but realistic, with the types of surrealist flourishes that would make Dali proud. Fox’s is a dark, shadowy world of second rate carnivals, low rent flophouses and dustbowl trailer parks filled with ornery hustlers, scheming grifters, and Machiavellian femmes fatales, as witnessed by a support cast of affable hobos and menacing clowns.

When you find an artist whose collector base is composed mostly of other artists, you know you’re onto something. And it’s not enough that his paintings are the cat’s pajamas, he also custom carves his own frames. The resultant tramp art aesthetic adds a whole other dimensionality to the work, as each frame seems predestined for the piece that occupies it.