65GRAND is pleased to present Bob Jones: Form as Ruin, the artist’s fifth exhibition with the gallery. Jones uses raw materials-natural and manmade, organic and inorganic-such as stone, concrete and wood, to create objects that rest on the border of the sculptural and painterly.
The immediate has become of increasing importance to Jones. The materials in his work are gleaned from his immediate surroundings, a process he has come to think of as foraging. Immediate also describes the way the works on view are made. The artist embeds material into concrete cast in the shape of a painting as it sets.
The works, resembling fossils, call to mind the brief period in the mid to late 1950s when the sculptor David Smith experimented with relief paintings, throwing any and all materials, particularly bone, onto heavy surfaces with a liberal coating of enamel. With Jones there is more restrained intentionality however, resulting in objects that look formed by a chance, natural process that somehow follows the all over compositions of Abstract Expressionism or the design sense of Post Minimalism.
Jones describes them as “minimalist paintings,” which, “approach the landscape.” But rather than depicting it, they literally include it. There is something more direct, or immediate if you will, in the act of placing organic matter from the landscape physically into the very body of a painting.
Bob Jones lives and works in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Recent solo exhibitions include Gathered & Buried, Kiehle Gallery, St. Cloud, MN; and Stone White Vinegar, Tree House Gallery, Arlington Heights, IL, both in 2012. Group exhibitions include the upcoming I’m Jealous of Your Failures, curated by Trew Schriefer in 2014; Häxen Daze, currently on view at Normandale Community College Gallery in Bloomington, MN; and recently House of the Seven Gables, curated by Kendra Paitz at University Galleries, Illinois Statue University, Normal, IL in 2013; IAAFBJHMJNMOMRSATSW, Fountain Studios, Brooklyn, NY in 2010. His work has been featured by ArtSlant, Bad at Sports, Beautiful Decay and Newcity.