Super Dope Art II

Summer 2017

The Palette and Chisel Academy of Fine Arts, Chicago, IL.

Installation Views

Installation View

Works Exhibited

Dark Horse

Acrylic and Collage on Canvas, 54 x 72 inches

PRIVATE COLLECTION

Moose Bolt

Acrylic on Canvas, 65 x 77 inches

FOR SALE

Fire, Fire!

Acrylic on Canvas, 30 x 42 inches

PRIVATE COLLECTION

Monday Monster

Acrylic and Charcoal on Canvas, 44 x 76 inches

FOR SALE

Plethora

Acrylic on Panel, 44 x 44 inches

PRIVATE COLLECTION

Cow Storm

Acrylic on Canvas

PRIVATE COLLECTION

About

Super Dope Art II is artist Nathan Silver’s second solo exhibition, combining dozens of new abstract and realism paintings with performances by Chicago’s top singers, DJ’s, and jazz musicians. Nathan Silver creates paintings to provide peace, awe and happiness; the Super Dope Art exhibition functions as a living, breathing, interactive painting we all experience together for one night only. The gallery remained opened for two weeks following the opening receptions, and featured Nathan Silver’s oil-realism portraiture, as well as new large-scale abstract paintings of animals.

Detouring from his traditional oil-realism portraits, Nathan Silver filled the main room of the gallery with his series of large colorful abstract paintings depicting Earth’s wonderful animals. This new series pushes and bends the concept of applied classical realism. The animals compete and intricately combine with intense, colorful abstract backgrounds, just as the natural beauty of today's Earth struggles with, and is overcome by man’s relentless, mysterious, and endless desire to expand and grow. Will the breathtaking animals that we share the Earth with today live on only as figments of our grandchildren’s imaginations?

The abstract imagery that engulfs the gallery walls is a direct result of Nathan Silver’s intensive oil-realism practice. Painting the many faces, portraits, and figures that populate his shows and private collections, Nathan Silver felt the overwhelming energetic need to paint freely and without any pre-conception. The results are intricate energy fields that resemble a tumultuous ocean surface at sunset. They function as mental guides to meditation, meant to help create new neurological pathways for the viewer. When one stares into one of Nathan Silver’s abstract paintings, the mind wanders as it follows the paths of a color, or a line, or form, as all three blend and bleed, dance and explode into one another in continuous harmony. These abstract paintings balance the chaotic colors, lines, and forms of the modern world, and let the viewer relax knowing that even the most chaotic realities follow a harmonious form and function.