event details posted by: begins: Oct 1, 6:00 pm ends: Oct 31, 6:00 pm location: Knapp Gallery 162 N 3rd St.

For Immediate Release

Contact: Karl Slocum

267-455-0279

karl@knappgallery.com

The Knapp Gallery Presents

Skip Hill: The Majestic Duelist

First Friday Opening: October 1^st, 2010

Exhibition Dates:  October 1^st – October 31^st

 Artist Reception:  Sat. October 2^nd (6:00 – 9:00 pm)

(Philadelphia) – The Knapp Gallery continues its tradition of First Friday openings and welcomes Skip Hill in his first solo show at the Knapp Gallery.  From Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Skip is making his north, just having an exhibition of 30 drawings and collages, “Butterfly Confessions” at the Avisca Fine Art Gallery, in Marietta Ga.  His first major exhibition in Philadelphia, Skip exhibits a body of most recent paintings The Majestic Duelist.

Skip Hill is not a simple man.  His intensity as a painter, voiced through a heady non-typical display of scholasticism, a body of paintings bent towards the intelligentsia, challenges viewers to embrace and appropriate the power of his fresh new and iconic language.  Hill’s new language is a systematic dialogue that jabs at societal branding, stereotypical misrepresentation, classism and subjugating stigmatism.  Skillfully rendered, Hill’s frenetic glyphs, tattooed across a select group of caricatures are cryptic, terse, sarcastic, comedic, taunting and indicting. 

Greatly intrigued by our escalating tattoo culture, Hill investigates the branding and marketing of a new morality. Wanting a meritocracy, with pugilistic fisticuffs, Skip strikes out against the constraints imposed on Black Artists.  Knocking down traditional notions of acceptability, confining boundaries relegating “Black Art” genre back seat admittance, like David, Skip goes toe to toe with Goliath. All in all, Skip hill is a fighter.  Skip Hill is a fine Artist - not a Black Artist.

Imagery and subject matter driven more by the content and context of his travels, Skip’s art reflects an amalgamation of multi-cultural faire.  Neo-Mulattism, an end and by-product of his surgically deft distillation and synthesizing of elemental cultural components, Skip’s visual and visceral gumbo pedantic in its heavy handedness, affords us radical insight into contemporary human nature.  Skip Hill reflects, “Majestic Duelist investigates the clash and blending of high and low culture and the internal war of duality in Man as Saint and Sinner, symbolized by the metaphor of the prizefighter which figures prominently in my iconography.”

Narratives include characters and caricatures inspired by Byzantine icons, the suits of playing cards, are both Jesters and Kings with both secret identities and menacing mysteries behind the mask that they (and we) wear.  Paintings like Menina with Bromeliad2 and Angel Baby reflect an admiration for Diego Velazquez, Spanish court painter for King Philip IV.  Hill has higher regard for Black outsider artists Lonnie Holley, Jimmie Lee Sudduth and Mose Tolliver.