PARIS .- Over the Influence has now opened LITTLE GOODY TWO SHOES, a solo exhibition of new works from American artist Todd James. Having debuted in our Paris gallery on 4 May 2023, Little Goody Two Shoes will be on view through 10 June 2023.

This show of all new works vividly acquaints the viewer with James’ singular world and its visual iconography. Women often dominate in James’ work, and this exhibition is no exception. Powerful in their detachment and surrounded by familiar James totems such as cats, guns, captain caps and cigarettes, these figures exude a sense of effortless and fully embodied agency.

Five of the James’ war-themed acrylic works debut a newly emerging style, interpretations of deeply saturated marker drawings in black books, shaded and stippled, bringing a three-dimensional electricity to heretofore two-dimensional figures.

With LITTLE GOODY TWO SHOES the artist also presents for the first time a selection of pen and ink on paper. Potent works, some of these small scale drawings celebrate 1970s fantasy art and pay homage to maestros such as R. Crumb, Frank Frazetta, Pedro Bell and Peter Saul. Others in this series re-visit a recurring James subject, war and its various grotesqueries. Here are anthropomorphized tanks, engaged in battle, one frenzied, another exhausted, all built to kill and each one with twisted up guts, suffering. One of them waves a white flag. In a western world that regularly sweeps the atrocity of war under the rug, James’ work never fails to address the elephant in the room that is American Empire.

Biography

Todd James is a celebrated New York artist from the generation following Jean-Michel Basquiat, Rammellzee, and Kenny Scharf. A style leader in multiple mediums over a period of decades, James’s work has been recognized since his teenage years writing the moniker REAS. Within the context of street pop, James has collaborated with artists such as Kaws, Barry McGee, and Espo, as well as creating commercial works in collaboration with the Beastie Boys, Iggy Pop, Eminem, Pharrell Williams and other cultural icons. James, along with Barry McGee and Espo, is a co-creator of Street Market, a major work of the post-graffiti movement that debuted at Deitch Projects in New York City in 2000. Street Market was subsequently shown at the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001, and later traveled as far as the Parco Museum in Tokyo. A re- creation of Street Market was the central installation of the LA MOCA’s record breaking Art in the Street exhibition a decade later. In 2015, James’ work was once chosen for the Venice Biennale. In "The Bridges Of Graffiti," one of the 2015 Biennale’s official exhibitions, James’ work Vandal’s Bedroom was exhibited to great acclaim, and the installation subsequently traveled to New York, London, Madrid, Copenhagen and Los Angeles. James continues to receive increasing international attention, in recent years emerging as one of the leading artists to take part in “Beyond the Streets,” a traveling special exhibition which embodies the rising global momentum of street art, currently on view at Saatchi Gallery in London.