.........Adam Baumgold Gallery presents the first New York solo exhibition of drawings by Huston Ripley from September 8 through October 8, 2011. Ripley's intricate, obsessive ink drawings are worked on delicately layered sheets of Japanese mending paper. Tapping the collective unconscious, Ripley's sensuous, psychedelic imagery permeates the layered paper creating an effect of mysterious depth, both ancient and modern. Reminiscent of Hindu imagery, themes of death, rebirth, the spiritual and corporeal intertwine to a gently profound effect.

.........Ripley's drawings began from years of repetitively drawing on napkins and evolved organically into the sophisticated visual vocabulary that makes up his current works. Each drawing has twelve or sixteen layers of paper. His ink bleeds through the layers of thin paper, creating the line quality of an image incised in stone. The formal qualities of dark ink and minute rendering suggest primitive art of no specific culture. Recurrent symbolism of eggs, snakes, skulls, flames, faces, and nude bodies create an archetypal space.

.........The drawing Untitled (10XL1), 2010 resembles a Tibetan Mandala in its schematic layout of repetitive patterning and iconography. Vignettes of human figures have a Gnostic tone, one showing a holy family with two children with halos. The Circle of Life is enclosed within the egg, suggesting an eternal cycle of worlds within worlds. Tiny faces peer out of the shadows of the past or future. The anonymous human figures that people the works could be tripped out hippies or forgotten ancestors. There are aspects of many traditions present, but the deity-like figures that occasionally appear on closer inspection turn out to be human. The drawings suggest that there is nothing more spiritual or mysterious than life.

.........Huston Ripley studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania, and received his MFA from the Pratt Institute in New York. He has exhibited his drawings in New York at Adam Baumgold Gallery, Feature Inc., Morgan Lehman and Calvin-Morris; in Los Angeles at Daniel Weinberg Gallery: in Philadelphia at Fleisher/Ollman and Projects Gallery; and in Paris as Trafic Galerie. His works are in several collections including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the Collection Art Visionary in Melbourne, Australia, among others. He lives and works in Philadelphia.

.........Gallery hours are Tuesday - Saturday 11:00 - 5:30 PM.