Aspen Art Museum

Chase Hall & Jackson Pollock

July 27 – August 27, 2023

The second presentation of A Lover’s Discourse features a new painting by New York–based artist Chase Hall (b.1993, St. Paul, Minnesota) exhibited alongside Jackson Pollock’s Untitled (1951), a work on paper on loan from the collection of Susan and Larry Marx. Responding to a variety of social and visual systems—from sport to music to cultural motifs—each of which intersects with complex trajectories of race, hybridity, economics, and individual agency, Hall generates images whose materiality is as crucial to their compositional makeup as their use of figuration. Key to the artist’s painterly palette is the use of unprimed white cotton canvas and the infusion of paint with brewed coffee to obtain a wide range of pigments with different textures and hues of brown. Hall leaves areas of the cotton canvas uncovered as a way to engage with the weighted history of this material. He also builds the color white into the composition with seemingly accidental shapes and patterns that encode additional imagery and pareidolic forms. This technique reflects the artist’s preoccupation with the visibility of the canvas from both a material and conceptual standpoint, in dialogue with traditions of post-war abstraction. Hall’s new work for A Lover’s Discourse, titled Field Painting (2022-23), was completed upon identifying examples of abstract pieces in local private collections in Aspen. The direct juxtaposition of Field Painting with Pollock’s Untitled work on paper unlocks a critical reading of the semiotics and cultural values attached to the drip paint technique across histories of abstraction, improvisation, mark-making, and politics of labor.

Chase Hall’s presentation will be accompanied by a newly commissioned essay by the art historian Dr. David Anfam, a leading expert on Pollock’s oeuvre.

A Lover’s Discourse is a series of artist-led presentations introducing unexpected dialogues between artworks from different generations. Each exhibition juxtaposes recent works by an early-career artist with their choice of companion piece from a private collection in Aspen. Artist selections range from historical and contemporary pieces, and span figurative and abstract painting, sculpture, video, works on paper, and sound.

ABOUT CHASE HALL

Chase Hall’s (b. 1993, St. Paul, Minnesota) paintings and sculptures respond to generational celebrations and traumas encoded throughout American history. He was the subject of a solo exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia from February 28 through August 21, 2023. In 2022, Hall was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to produce a large-scale artwork, the monumental diptych Medea Act I & II, for its opera house in New York, on view through June 2023. Hall has been included in group exhibitions including Together in Time: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum (2023), Los Angeles; Black American Portraits, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2021); Young, Gifted and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art, University of Illinois Chicago (2021); and This Is America | Art USA Today, Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, the Netherlands. Hall has been an artist-in-residence at The Mountain School of Arts, Los Angeles; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), North Adams, Massachusetts; and Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture, Maine. Hall’s work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Baltimore Museum of Art; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Hall lives and works in New York where he is an adjunct professor at New York University’s Steinhardt Department of Art.

Exhibition Guide

A Lover’s Discourse: Chase Hall