Bask has selected these specifically to commemorate not only this being his fourth print with 1xRUN but also his November 19th and fourth solo exhibit with the William Rupnik Gallery in Cleveland Ohio, titled BOX OF FUN . For more information on this show, please go to William Rupnik Gallery
Fun Box Toons, is the title of Basks new print. It features 4 characters which have been disassembled, mixed up and put back together, creating a warped cartoon showcase. The idea behind this piece is that despite these difficult times, we can still have fun and manipulate our own realities even while our realities are constantly changing us. Bask has bent what were once cute and cuddly pals into twisted yet lovable Fun Box Toons. A metaphor, that in these adverse times, we don't always come out the same way we came in.
Discuss This Run
About the Artist
Location: Florida
Bask is the moniker of one, Ales Bask Hostomsky, who along with his parents emigrated from Czechoslovakia to Florida and began to soak up America’s popular iconic imagery along with the sun. He quickly began to notice similarities between the communistic iconic propaganda from his youth and the consumer advertising of his teens. Bask soon discovered that they were simply, two sides of the same coin. Each vying for our short-lived attention spans, all the while selling us (or telling us?) anything and everything from Marxism to McDonalds. Seeking conspiracies -and finding them embedded in the popular iconography of the mass media, Bask began painting bold, media critical broadsides to assuage his fear of being manipulated. A fear cultivated in a repressive regime, had now returned, but to the most unlikely and safest of places- The American living room.
The artist’s richly textural work imbue his “anti-iconic,” sometimes satirical worldview with an undercurrent of dark emotion. His canvases are the city’s flotsam and jetsam of industrial and consumer decay. Combining his graphic skill with his trademark multi-layered applications, Bask builds up the surface only to break down the image. “My art is a type of deconstruction,” says Bask, “I try to focus on the imperfection of things, rather then their unachievable perfection.”
Bask’s imagery has appeared in countless publications in both advertising and editorial capacities. His work has been shown in the Florida International Museum as well as the Jacksonville Museum of Modern Art, which also has his work in its permanent collection. Bask has also exhibited his work in solo shows in Baltimore, Detroit, Miami and Tampa among others.
Find out more @ http://knownasbask.com
