Sun
John Bohl
October 24 – December 14
John Bohl, Sun, 2024 28 x 22 inches (71.1 × 55.9 cm) Acrylic and gouache on canvas
Stump Gallery is pleased to announce Sun, a solo exhibition by John Bohl. In this series of paintings, Bohl constructs improbable scenes that unfold within a meticulously manipulated world of his own making. The works oppose narrative cohesion, floating instead through spaces that oscillate between the familiar and the estranged. At moments, their stock-image familiarity offers a place to rest at others, they open into vast, uneasy expanses. Bohl revels in the comically indeterminate, staging a joke whose punchline withdraws from us at the final moment. Meaning flutters at the edges, any attempts to assemble coherence only deepen the disorientation. His paintings seem to slip from view even as we look, perpetually in motion, perpetually becoming. Sun embodies this tension, the bittersweet recognition that our lives unfold within both the banal and the absurd, the lucid and the unknowable.
Text by Ray Steele
John Bohl (b. 1983, New York) is an American artist living and working in Baltimore, Maryland. Working primarily in painting, his practice spans installation and collaboration that examine abstraction, surface, and the conditions of display within artist-run and institutional contexts.
