MARFA — RULE Gallery is delighted to present a two-person exhibition, The Unusual Suspects, featuring paintings on paper by Joe Clower and small-scale sculptures by Amber Cobb, after a well-received run in RULE’s Denver location. The exhibition is on view through June 15, 2024. The gallery will host a public talk by artist Amber Cobb on Saturday May 11 , starting at 4 p.m.
Though distinctly individual in their approach to material, both artists are tied together by their interest in biomorphic, hybrid forms whose appearance can be understood as futuristic, otherworldly, playful, or even scheming.
While Clower’s stark, hard-edged mechanistic forms reveal enigmatic narratives of a modern industrialized and depersonalized world, Cobb’s intimately scaled works are faintly discernible as once-functional objects melded into one another, playfully reemerging with protrusions, a bit more swollen and stretched. Both artists draw us into a peculiar physical and psychological reality, leaving us to decode the hidden messages amongst rich hues, wry humor and strangely elusive forms. The exhibition acts as an invitation to examine the complexity that materializes when the bizarrely outlandish and the strangely mundane collide with the human psyche’s awkward, yet often beautiful, depths.
Joe Clower received his BFA in 1963 from the University of Georgia in Athens, and his MFA in 1967 from the University of Colorado at Boulder. While at CU Boulder, he became connected with many of Colorado’s new wave of artists as a member of Boulder’s Armory Group and later the Criss-Cross artist cooperative. Clower has exhibited his work nationally since 1964.
Amber Cobb is an American artist living and working in Denver, Colorado. Cobb received her M.F.A. in sculpture from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2011. Since then, her
work has been exhibited in institutions both nationally and internationally.
