Harris Lieberman is pleased to announce Viva la Raspberries, a group exhibition organized in collaboration with Evan Holloway. In the middle of Andy Warhol’s The Loves of Ondine (1967), the film abruptly switches to color. A man rides into a kitchen on a bicycle, stark naked. A group of young Latin American men calling themselves “The Bananas” showers him with everything they find in the cabinets, refrigerator, and garbage. The B-side of "Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band" loops in the background. One of the young men shouts repeatedly, "Viva la raspberries.” It seems nearly certain that at least one of the men is under the influence of LSD.
Inspired by Warhol’s film, Viva la Raspberries is organized around Suzan Pitt’s 1979 movie Asparagus. Its loose, narrative mix of abstraction, the human, and the vegetable is representative of a modernism native to the West Coast. The surreal and psychedelic introspection displays its labor as an ambitious experiment in the limits of communication.
Joan Brown’s portraits from the same period reveal an autobiographical narrative that often invokes her peers in the Bay Area Figurative Movement. Working in Los Angeles now, Rebecca Morris and Linda Stark’s textural paintings reinterpret the conventions of modernism, but with different referents: Linda’s “Adorned paintings” mimic flesh and decoration, while Rebecca’s work draws on influences from architecture and ceramics.
A major figure of West Coast abstract ceramics, Ron Nagle has plumbed the medium for more than 50 years, creating variously amorphous and biological forms. Similarly disrupting the divide between functionality and art, Matt Paweski’s wall-mounted sculptures use the craft of furniture making to create a familiar and intimate aesthetic.
Roy Dowell’s recent work culls elements of popular and world cultures for abstract, quasi-functional sculptures that evoke the organic and the ritual. Evan Holloway’s casts of modified branches attempt to reconfigure what was once organic. A poem hovers above David Hughes’s homemade pair of scissors that wears a yellow bikini and lays on a drawing of a beach towel. Surreal and anthropomorphic, the scene echoes Pitt’s Asparagus.