Artist's bold paintings have unique symbolic vocabulary

We Sing the Body Electric, 2007, Baker Overstreet. Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 inches

Artist Baker Overstreet was home from New York recently, visiting his family and reclaiming paintings that went into storage when the Mary Pauline Gallery closed a few months back. Having retrieved a couple of large paintings and several of his earlier, small-scale character works, he spent part of an afternoon scoping out wall space in his parents’ home, “to discreetly hang them for storage,” he says, laughing.

Discreet is not the word that would first come to mind with Baker Overstreet paintings; they tend to be anything but inconspicuous. Bold in color and execution, his paintings command attention with their unique symbolic vocabulary that has been described as both ancient and futuristic. His current work, he says, leans “even more toward figurative abstraction… or maybe symbolist abstraction.” Those are the descriptive terms he was offering his mother last week.

Molly McDowell was among those who recognized something special in the young artist early on, mounting solo shows at her Mary Pauline Gallery here in 2004 and 2006 and giving him experience as a gallery assistant. His work last made a public appearance in Augusta at the Imperial Theatre in 2006, when his large, two-paneled work commissioned by the Augusta Ballet was both backdrop and visual element in a performance of Merce Cunningham’s “Cross Currents.”

While Baker’s work draws strongly on primitive imagery and folk traditions, he brings to his art a solid academic grounding. After graduating from Augusta Preparatory Day School in the class of 2000, he went on to earn a B.F.A. degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2004 and then the M.F.A. from Yale University in 2006.

Now, after a couple of years immersed in the New York art world (he recently moved into a warehouse studio in Brooklyn), he is clearly a young artist to watch. In 2007 he was mentioned in LA Weekly, Avenue magazine and the New York Times, and he was in group shows in Los Angeles and Berlin.

These days he is busy preparing for his second New York solo show at Fredericks & Freiser Gallery in Chelsea. His exhibit will open there in September and then will reappear in a slightly different form at Franklin Artworks in Minneapolis next April.

Baker is also represented in the Saatchi Collection in London, which acquired works from his previous show at Fredericks & Freiser. A major player in British contemporary art, Charles Saatchi has drawn occasional media controversy and a wide range of critical response over the years.

The Saatchi Gallery is now renovating a 50,000 square foot space in the Duke of York’s Headquarters near Sloane Square in London. Baker will be in a major exhibition there in 2009 – titled “Abstract America: New Painting from the U.S.” – and his work will be illustrated in the book of the same title that will accompany the show. “It’s fun to know that my work will be available in your neighborhood bookstore,” he says. He also knows that having his work in an international exhibition catalog means a tangible, permanent record of a major accomplishment.

The exact date for that show has yet to be finalized, since the usual construction delays have affected the renovation of the gallery space, but Baker is excited about “making a jaunt across the pond” for the opening. In the meantime, examples of his work are on the Saatchi website at www.Saatchi-gallery.co.uk and the Fredericks & Freiser website, www.fredericksfreisergallery.com.

He is comfortable with his relationship to his galleries, acknowledging that
“having representation could have a negative effect on one's work – that being that the style or aesthetic is influenced by one's representation,” he says. “I have been lucky to work with people who have never expected anything from me other than that I explore at my own pace in my own way. In that sense, representation has freed me to do as I please.”

In discussing his new work, Baker says he is trying to reconcile some of the recent and even-more-recent images in his head for cohesiveness as he prepares for the upcoming New York show. His earlier work done in very different styles has not lost its appeal, however.

“In terms of the ‘student work,’ I am very proud of it and still delighted to see it. It has been very helpful in current paintings to stop and look at the work from the past. I learn a lot from it still. I will say that the older paintings show perhaps a more naive or less responsible approach in terms of the audience or any sort of greater purpose outside myself. That makes me cringe sometimes, but it's not unusual, I guess. With age comes wisdom, right?”

Here’s how his New York gallery describes what he does:

“Baker Overstreet’s paintings rely on an aesthetic that is rooted in folk and primitive arts. He employs unbalanced and ornamental patterning to make emblematic compositions that define human or architectural figures while subverting familiar form. This inherent contradiction (between the familiar and unfamiliar, the worldly and other worldly) creates a space where individual elements clash. The resulting phenomenon allows for an altered state where the specificity of an image gives way to something open and universal.”

Got that? Need more? Here’s what the Saatchi Gallery says, the British spelling adding an interesting touch to some rather potent prose:

“Influenced by tribal and folk art, Baker Overstreet envisions a primitive abstraction reflective of contemporary zeitgeist. In totemic compositions of bold colour and stylized patterning, Overstreet develops his own painterly lexicon comprised of personal symbolism and gesture….

“Thick gooey swatches of impasto are juxtaposed with wandering drips, hurried mark-making, and defined geometric forms. Areas of patchy tincture battle to dominate their visible under-painting while tonal perspective is skewed, as each individual shape tries to extrapolate itself from the flatness of the picture plane. Overstreet’s paintings evolve as instinctive and raw sentiments; eliciting a faux-naïve charisma, his paintings bridge the gulf between primordial ritual and modern excess.”

I don’t know about faux-naïve charisma, but there’s no question the young artist has plenty of offbeat charm. He generates an excitement that makes you think it would be wise to stay tuned and see where all that talent and energy will take him next.