Steven Hull
[3][4][5] In his personal work, he frequently creates immersive, multimedia tableaux and exhibitions that Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight described as "carnivalesque hybrids of painting and sculpture whose chief aim is to turn visions of the conventional world upside down.
[19] He became interested in art in his late teens after being involved in theater and before committing to college, took classes and worked as an assistant at University of Texas for artists Robert Colescott, Mary Lovelace O'Neill and Michael Tracy.
[2][6][25] His paintings and drawings oscillate between edgy, expressionist figurative works (involving carnival, erotic, sea or political themes) and geometric or lyrical abstraction; he often juxtaposes them with found objects and handmade, theatrical assemblage sculptures in exhibitions that may also include sound and motion.
[10][8][26][3] Hull gained early recognition for his paintings and drawings,[23][27] with publications such as Artforum and LA Weekly placing him among a younger generation of Los Angeles painters whose work nonchalantly and self-consciously disrupted modernist paradigms such as intentionality, the expressive "truth" of gesture, and rigid distinctions between abstraction and figuration.
2001; and "Painful Giggles", 2004, which included works made with his children), Hull pursued irreverent conceptual and presentation strategies (e.g., multiple panels, stacked canvasses) that complicated or subverted traditional genres and gallery practices.
[3][2][25] Its centerpiece was Engine Room, a sprawling assemblage of roughly twenty Day-Glo colored paintings stacked and leaning against the wall with flat-black, furniture-like props suggesting Louise Nevelson or Tony Smith sculptures in the foreground.
"[3] Hull's exhibition "Never Again Sharpen Your Teeth On the Rope That Holds You So Safely to Shore" (2016) combined carnival and nautical motifs, contrasting a sense of adventure and whimsy with themes of melancholy, decadence, alienation and militarism.
[18][33][34] Christopher Knight described the centerpiece of his 2017 show, If Jesus Gives Us Everything We Want, We’ll Love Him, as a "sad, sinister, pitch-perfect lament for our troubled time" that "puts white nationalism and its perversion of authentic Christian values on sordid display.
[6] His three-part exhibition, "Our Little Chapel by the Lake: The Transformation of Jesus Christ" (2019), featured abstract and figurative paintings, a kinetic sculpture, and a record release and performance exploring characteristic nautical, carnivalesque and political themes.
After narrowing to 24 works (by writers such as Aimee Bender, Ben Ehrenreich, Rachel Kushner, and Tom McCarthy), they turned them over to artists (e.g., Derek Boshier, Andrea Bowers, Glenn Ligon) for illustrations, and then to designers (e.g., Gail Swanlund) to create the finished books.
[4][18] He produced an enormous art theme park called Circus of Death, which featured two prop-festooned trains, a haunted church/bouncy house by Jim Shaw, monster costumes by Marnie Weber, puppets and figurative sculptures with sound, videos, and performances by himself and others.
[4][48][36] In 2017, he participated in the "Murals of La Jolla" public art project with Man, Myths and Magic, a vibrant, billboard-sized reproduction of a five-by-seven-inch drawing of his, which combined abstract, referential and fantastical qualities in its depiction of a humanoid figures emerging from a surreal landscape.
