Allison Schulnik. Home for Hobo

09.01.2010 - 06.02.2010

Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica / United States

Since her first solo show at Mark Moore Gallery in 2007, Allison Schulnik has embarked on an unparalleled contemporary tour de force. She has established an esteemed international presence with one-person exhibitions in Rome and New York City, in addition to her inclusion in over twenty group shows in cities as diverse as Paris, Hafia, Toronto, Turin, Salzburg, Frankfurt, Seoul, Dallas and Los Angeles, among others. Schulnik’s innately prolific tendencies have earned her unique stature amongst both the critical and popular, and now – with ten new staggering paintings and her fifth full-length animated video, “Forest” - she returns to Mark Moore Gallery for her second solo exhibition, Home for Hobo....

Schulnik’s favored “fools and rejects” have oftentimes encompassed tragic visitors and clowns, heartrending animals and spirits seeking refuge within her canvases, offering poignancy within their imperfections and ostracization. In this body of work, the hobo asserts himself as an emblem of commonality between these characters, and their collective desire for companionship, sex and beauty.

In the artist’s words: Home for Hobo finds our protagonist in the vulnerable state of longing. Allowing his mind to clumsily, dangerously meander through an unattainable existence. However, for the deprived and the depraved, even the most glowing of fantasies are still dotted with crusting scabs. Some say the hobo knows us better than we know ourselves. Sometimes it is this very sense that betrays and haunts him.

Great gobs [of paint] bedeck her curdled, very funny riffs on the portrait, still life and landscape genres. “Impasto” is an insufficient terms; School of London paint-slingers like Leon Kossof and Frank Auerback look timid in comparison…Like her near-contemporaries, Jim Drain and Rosson Crow, flamboyant artists with goth/romantic inclinations and a flair for the ironically uncouth, Schulnik has set her career off to an auspicious start.

Stephen Maine, Art In America, 2009