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BASK is the moniker of one, Ales Bask Hostomsky, who
along with his parents emigrated from Czechoslovakia
to Florida and began to soak up America's popular
iconic imagery along with the sun. He quickly began to
notice similarities between the communistic iconic
propaganda from his youth and the consumer advertising
of his teens. BASK soon discovered that they were
simply two sides of the same coin, each vying for our
short-lived attention spans, all the while selling us
(or telling us?) anything and everything from Marxism
to McDonalds. Seeking conspiracies-and finding them
embedded in the popular iconography of the mass media,
BASK began painting bold, media critical broadsides to
assuage his fear of being manipulated. A fear
cultivated in a repressive regime, had now returned,
but to the most unlikely and safest of places—the
American living room. The artist's richly textural
work imbue his "anti-iconic," sometimes satirical
worldview with an undercurrent of dark emotion. His
canvases are the city's flotsam and jetsam of
industrial and consumer decay. Combining his graphic
skill with his trademark multi-layered applications,
BASK builds up the surface only to break down the
image. "My art is a type of deconstruction," says
BASK, "I try to focus on the imperfection of things,
rather then their unachievable perfection." BASK's
imagery has appeared in countless publications in both
advertising and editorial capacities. His work has
been shown in the Florida International Museum as well
as the Jacksonville Museum of Modern Art which also
has his work in its permanent collection. BASK has
also exhibited his work in solo shows in Baltimore,
Detroit, Miami and Tampa among others. |
