Below is a poster that Jon Kalish helped me make for my May 2008 exhibition called Mr. Hangover at Leo Koenig Inc. The image in the poster is from a painting that I made for the exhibition, and part of a larger installation of 22 paintings on paper that were intended to suggest street posters.

The poster was printed and wheat pasted all over the west side of Manhattan for a few weeks leading up to the exhibition. If it was to function properly as an advertisement for my exhibition, I probably should have included more information, such as my name, on the poster. But I intended the poster as a piece of art unto itself, and so I wanted it to be enigmatic – a street poster that didn’t quite manage to serve its purpose as an advertisement for my exhibition. Besides, I thought that the poster looked so clean and beautiful with limited information, the function had to be sacrificed for the formal concerns of the art object.

Later when I had a chance to reflect on this first iteration of the poster project, I decided that the most interesting aspect of this project had been the desemination of the art work. In fact I would be interested in creating works that were functional, and required reproduction and distribution in order to be completed.

Having been a fan of Martin Kippenberger since my school days, I was aware that he had commissioned colleagues to create some of his exhibition posters. Artist such as Christopher Wool, Jeff Koons, Laurence Weiner, Mike Kelly, A.R. Penck and many others participated in the project. I always liked this idea, and decided that I could reverse engineer the project. I would ask my own colleagues to allow me to make exhibition posters for their shows in exchange for artwork. The poster painting that I would produce would have to be reproduced as a poster or flyer for the exhibition, and be used by the gallery as promotional material for the exhibition. The trade would be for anything that the artist decides to give me, provided it is included in the exhibition as a work of art.

I hope to produce poster paintings for a number of artist over the course of a decade or so. The final stage of the project will be to organize an exhibition of all the posters that I have made to be displayed along with the art pieces with which they were exchanged.

This blog is intended to track the progress of the Poster Project.