"I appreciate the Rococo for its extravagance and theatricality, as it appeals to my love of kitsch."- STUART NETSKY
Netsky is a conceptual artist making paintings, mixed media sculptures, prints and other objects. An original voice and artist whose work jumps off the canvas and confronts us with the eclectic absurdity of our image inundated culture. A lover of the theatrical, mixed with his unique version of pop and Romantic master painting.
His work is made in distinct series, creating a pictorial eclecticism that obscures our ability to make sense of the image, acting as a metaphor for the confusion and shifting dichotomies in social interactions.Digital images speak to our technologically driven world and reflect the temporal paradox in pop culture whereby the past is brought to the present, the present to the past. He digitally appropriates art and historical images with those from film and popular culture, juxtaposed with psychedelic and floral patterns and mixes them all together. His influences include Francois Boucher and Gerhard Richter, Jean-Honore Fragonard, Gene Davis, Bridget Riley, Nicholas Krushenick and Jean-Antoine Watteau, among others - the rococo and abstraction, op art and pop art, anime and realism, and the psychedelic all come together, layered, spliced and distorted, materials that evoke the psychosexual. He views his practice as a drag display operating within the time he has lived in while embracing nostalgia and romanticism for their tender and universal sensibilities.
He received a Master of Art in Art Education from Philadelphia College of Art in 1986 and went on to receive a Master of Fine Art in sculpture from Tyler School of Art, Elkins Park, PA in 1990.
Netsky was an Adjunct Professor at The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, and is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Jefferson University.
He has had solo exhibitions of his work at Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art, Larry Becker Contemporary Art, Richard Anderson, NYC, Locks Gallery, Bridgette Mayer Gallery, and a retrospective at the Rosenwald Wolf Gallery, University of the Arts. He has also shown in innumerable group shows nationally and internationally. In 1995, he received the Pew Fellowship in the Arts. His work is in the collections of The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Woodmere Art Museum, as well as the Johnson and Johnson Collection and many private collections.
