This exhibition inaugurates the collaboration of Wright and Valerie Carberry Gallery. Represented by Carberry since 2005, Jim Lutes has been featured in three solo exhibitions and five group shows at the gallery in Chicago. Lutes has been included in two Whitney Biennials (1987 and 2010) but Jim Lutes: Ponies and Psychos, will be Lutes's first solo exhibition in New York in over twenty years. 

Ensnarled in Lutes' semi-abstractions is a cast of unlikely witnesses to the violent histories of the Pacific Northwest. Having grown up in Washington, Lutes has extensively researched the people and traveled the places that he paints. Citizens, horses, landscapes, and the artist himself are depicted as though risen from an untold and painful American narrative, one that is stained by the ongoing betrayal of Native American populations in the nineteenth century. The prismatic sightlines in these paintings darken the American mythos of the West while debating the essential tenets of painting. Each work is openly structured as an exploration of pure gestural finesse and an interrogation of the world of signs and images. With these questions, Lutes appears to demand an accounting of the overlapping personal and social histories that he depicts; yet these very inquiries forestall the possibility of ever reaching a single perspective.

Note: Artwork shown above in detail.