Jeremy Blake

JEREMY BLAKE (1971 - 2007) was an artist of recognized accomplishment and promise. His artistic achievements and career were fast on the rise. He was considered influential and iconoclastic. Sadly, Blake committed suicide on July 17, 2007 in New York City one week after his beloved companion of 12 years, Theresa Duncan, committed suicide--the reasons for which remain open only to conjecture. His sixth solo exhibition at Kinz, Tillou + Feigen was scheduled to showcase Blake's latest film "Glitterbest", a collaborative "portrait" of cultural impresario Malcolm McLaren, soon after its premier in a current solo exhibition of his narrated films at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. However, "Glitterbest" was incomplete at the time of Blake's death. The memorial show at Kinz, Tillou + Feigen includes a selection of wall works, a retrospective of daily screenings of his 21 short animated films, as well as documentation of his unfinished last film.

Blake first garnered attention in the late 1990s with his large-scale, semi-abstract digital C-prints that rendered the appearance of being paintings and photographs, but were neither. He then began to animate sequences of such images to create continuously looping digital video works that emulated paintings and film, but were neither. His visually dense images often incorporated both abstract and representational expressions through the language of Modernism and voices of Film Noir. Blake's aesthetically stylized works addressed a range of subjects from violence and terrorism to glamour and decadence, from metaphors of architectural spaces to profiles of cultural personifications.