Opening next weekend at the Stefan Stux Gallery in Chelsea will be Join or Die, new paintings and drawings by artist Scott Anderson. The included paintings continue to employ references in composition to historical religious and landscape painting, while introducing an entirely new vocabulary of distortion and deconstruction. The images drip with a hyper-color palette which cause the subject to exist within a surreal world, which is full of symbols that refer to nationalism, military and war, loaded with strange characters, ritualistic activity and apocalyptic landscapes. The artist has stated that his work is concerned with “various moments of cultural and political upheaval, such as the naive embrace of unchecked capitalism in the American Revolution, and the inevitable fascism of the Russian Revolution.” The viewer is left to navigate these fragmented images, which can cause the feeling of being trapped in a dream or nightmare with total chaos, constructed with a complete disregard to logic.

Anderson is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His recently solo exhibitions include Rendezvous Point at the Light and Sie Gallery in Dallas and Misiisto at Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago. The artist has also completed exhibitions with Kavi Gupta Gallery in Berlin and Mark Moore Gallery in Santa Monica. The artist also exhibited in the Beautiful/Decay retrospective group exhibition, A to Z, this spring at the Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles.