FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Regen Projects
633 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90069
Tel. (310) 276-5424
Fax. (310) 276-7430

Billy Sullivan
August 1 – August 30, 2003
Gallery hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10:30 – 5:30 pm
Opening reception: Friday, August 1, 6:00 - 8:00 pm


Regen Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of New York artist Billy Sullivan. This exhibition will feature paintings and drawings from the mid 1970s through 2003. Organized by Clarissa Dalrymple, this survey of Sullivan’s work includes portraits and still lives. Sullivan’s works are, for the most part, rendered from snap shots, always with loose, improvisational lines, which infer the ad-hoc quality of a moment rather than document a subject.

In a recent essay Peter Schjeldahl writes, “Sullivan is a Warholian who navigates a river of communal Eros between its headwaters in personal romance and its delta-like exhaustion in society…He is a flaneur of his own and other people’s entangling affections…His keynote is a semi-detached, acute sensitivity to the active stickiness that hold people to each other…Looking at this kind of picture, we intuit intricate story-lines of cultural, social, and intimate cachet. Knowing the stories doesn’t matter. It may be best if we don’t know them. Laced with specificities as it is, the work exercises a universal power. Its poetic charge is Baudelarian: timeless meaning alights in ephemera.”
(Schjeldahl, Peter, “Fame Theory: Billy Sullivan’s Photographs,” published by Artpix, New York, 2001)

Another important aspect of Billy Sullivan’s work is his role as visual diarist. As Giovanni Intra writes, “ Working through a time when the visually describable context of American social life has dwindled, diminished, reconfigured, and come out anew, painfully traversing, as it has, the intellectual and health-related regimes of the 1980s which threatened to bury it under a plague of irony, Sullivan has persisted with drawing without a hint of irony and without the slightest wish of going off-track. It’s not so much the theory vs. fun problem, which Sullivan’s works deliver their pleasing anecdote to, but the very serious concern of having a really good time and describing it technically in the work of art.”
(Intra, Giovanni, “Ouverture,” Flash Art, p.100, November/December, 1998)

Sullivan’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the United States and internationally. Billy Sullivan has had recent solo exhibitions at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery and Fischbach Gallery in New York. His work appears in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Artpix recently published a CD-ROM and DVD project entitled, Billy Sullivan: Photographs.

An opening reception for Billy Sullivan will be held at the gallery on Friday, August 1 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. For further information please contact Jesse McBride or Shaun Caley Regen at the gallery, (310) 276-5424.