NEW YORK, NY.- Jonathan LeVine Gallery presents Thursday’s Girl, a series of new works on canvas by Southern California-based artist Josh Agle (Shag), in what will be his fourth solo exhibition at the gallery.
With an aesthetic strongly influenced by mid-century modern design, Agle renders his subjects and their surroundings with keen attention to figure and form. In his distinctive style, he creates clean shapes with crisp details and fluid line work painted in vividly saturated colors and sharply defined textural patterns. Affluence and luxury are attributes often associated with the imagery based on design elements portrayed in the architecture, furniture and fashion.
As in most of Agle’s exhibitions, a central narrative theme connects the body of work in Thursday’s Girl. This series of paintings were inspired by All Tomorrow’s Parties, the classic Velvet Underground song in which lyrics written by Lou Reed spoke to New York’s downtown art scene found in places such as Warhol’s Factory. Themes of youth, fame, celebrity, revelry, excess and exclusion are represented, throughout.
Thursday’s Girl is a recurring character that appears in several paintings in the exhibition, representing countless naïve, Midwestern girls who move to big cities in search of glamorous new lives. Drawn to the exciting worlds of art, music, fashion and film, Thursday’s Girl works a day job during the week and parties on the weekends, hoping to be discovered and accepted amidst drugs and drunken debauchery. The girl in the song, desperate to stay relevant, jumps on a fresh new trend every Thursday only to see it end by Sunday—a vicious cycle that repeats every weekend. The paintings highlight her fun and thrills yet foreshadow a bitter end where she ultimately falls victim to the superficial values of her idols—used up and spit out in favor of the next fresh, disposable muse.
Josh Agle, also known as Shag (a contraction of the last two letters of his first name and the first two letters of his last) was born in 1962. He is a painter, illustrator and designer, based in Southern California. He has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Brea Museum and Laguna Art Museum in California as well as galleries across the United States, Europe, Japan and Australia. Positive reviews of Agle’s exhibitions have been published in The New York Times, written by esteemed critics Roberta Smith and Ken Johnson. His artwork has been published in several books, been the subject of a documentary film, as well as a musical.
