Nightcrawling is Oscar yi Hou’s third solo exhibition with James Fuentes, gathering a new body of paintings that take underground nightlife and its afterglow as their subject. Where the artist’s earlier portraits set frontal sitters inside coded borders of symbol and text, these canvases move in close: figures and their surroundings dissolve into one another through vaporous marks, drips and hazes that register light before they disclose identity. Sightlines and gestures circulate across the picture, folding the viewer into the crowd’s own weather of colour, beat and breath — a portraiture of collective feeling that holds ecstasy and exhaustion, freedom and fatigue, in the same elastic hour.
The exhibition is accompanied by Nightcrawling: More Life, a print publication of new writing and poetry by the artist with texts by Juliana Huxtable, Jesús Hilario-Reyes, hannah baer, John Arthur Peetz and Kay Gabriel, designed by Daniel Leyva and edited by Adnan Qiblawi and Morgan Becker.
Oscar yi Hou (b. 1998, Liverpool, United Kingdom) lives and works in New York City and received his BA from Columbia University. He has held solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, James Fuentes and T293 Gallery, Rome, and his work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, ICA Miami, M+ and Crystal Bridges, among others.
James Fuentes