V1 GALLERY PROUDLY PRESENTS
DAYS
A solo exhibition by Steve Powers
V1 Gallery proudly presents Days a new solo exhibition by Steve Powers (US). In more than 60 new works, created over the past year, Powers engages the complexities of everyday life, in a poetic, reflective, humorous and distinctive tone. From the beginning of his career he has developed a visual language, often works painted with One Shot enamel paint on metal, which is equally fragile and authoritative.
In Days, Powers comments on mundane issues like, always running late, being lonely in a relationship, the trials and rewards of love, a text reads: NOW THAT WE ARE HERE NOWHERE ELSE MATTERS. Another work dryly states in pale green, pink and yellow letters: I PAID THE LIGHT BILL JUST TO SEE YOUR FACE. Other works comment on the human condition: TO BE HUMAN IS TO BE BLESSED WITH FORGET - or the self-referring work: MY DAY JOB IS TO DRAW CONCLUSIONS.
In many ways Days feels like reading Steve Powers personal diary. His work seems to remind us, to reflect on our everyday life as both individuals and society. That in our daily encounters with each other, as fellow humans, friends, enemies, lovers or both, the real magic is in the mundane.
STEVE POWERS (b.1968, lives and works in Manhattan) has created large-scale public projects and exhibited extensively for the past 13 years. He is a pioneer in concept and style. Together with fellow artists and friends, Todd James and Barry McGee, he created the exhibition Indelible Market for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in 2000. This exhibition morphed into the seminal Street Market show at Deitch Projects, which would travel on to Venice for 49th Venice Biennale in 2001. In 2004 Powers played a major part in the large Beautiful Losers exhibition that would loosely define a group of groundbreaking emerging American artists that the established art world found very hard to label. In 2004 he founded the Dreamland Artist Club, with Creative Time as his partner, he commissioned 45 contemporary artists to create signs and designs for the rundown amusement park Coney Island. In 2008 Powers would once again return to Coney Island to create the critically acclaimed and politically charged Water-Board Thrill Ride as part of Creative Times Democracy In America exhibition. In 2007 Powers had the honour of becoming a Fulbright Scholar, he used his grant to travel to Dublin and Belfast and create large-scale public murals together with local youths. 2007 was also the year Powers created his first solo museum exhibition for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, William Pym of ARTFORUM, ended his review of the show on this note: Here is painting with heart, surprisingly refreshing, remarkably effective. In 2009 he would undertake the massive public project A Love Letter For You in his native hometown of Philadelphia. Over the course of almost 2 years Powers and his crew created more than 50 murals along the elevated train line along Market Street in West Philadelphia, making the train ride a virtual poem on the rewards and complexities of relationships. The permanent installation received praise in booth Wall Street Journal and New York Times, a book and a documentary film about A Love Letter For You have recently been published.
Five weeks ago MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles) opened Art In The Streets, the first major Museum exhibition in America that seeks to map the development of art influenced and infused by the street, from Basquiat, Futura, Haring and Taki, to now. Once again Powers, together with fellow conspirators Barry McGee and Todd James created a genre defying multi media installation. We are honoured to welcome Steve Powers, sometimes known as ESPO, back to Copenhagen for his second solo exhibition at V1 Gallery.
