Koplin Del Rio Gallery

Koplin Del Rio is thrilled to host our debut exhibition of work by New York artist Josh Dorman. Through layering of diverse materials, Dorman creates intricately detailed and fantasy driven worlds. Primarily working in collage, ink, graphite and acrylic on panel, Dorman reposits found treasures, such as topographic maps, and textbook and manual clippings in layers upon his working surface. Dorman deftly builds his surfaces with cutout illustrations from antique books on themes such as engineering, farming, swimming, and botany and his own drawing and painting to create visions that play with notions of space, time, scale, dream worlds, and memory. Dorman states, "I want my paintings to feel dislocated in time, like they could have been made in 1850 or 2011...I want [viewers] to notice the beauty of a paper map and, not least, recall a time when a human mind and a human hand was needed to translate the planet into something visible". Deeply influenced by historic artists such as Breughel, Klee, Redon, Turner and, perhaps most of all, Bosch, Dorman sees the artwork of the past and present in a fluid state, one of the other, with timeless themes such as man vs. nature, mechanical vs. organic, substantive vs. ethereal. His work was recently cited by Maryna Hrushetska (former Executive Director of the Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles,) as the visual equivalent to the literary genre of Magical Realism due to its embrace of both "a rational view of reality and a depiction of the enigma of reality". 

There's nothing I can’t find under there.

Voices in the trees, the missing pages

of the sea.

Everything but sleep.

And night is a river bridging

the speaking and the listening banks.

A fortress, undefended and inviolate.

There's nothing that won’t fit under it:

Fountains clogged with mud and leaves

the houses of my childhood.

-Excerpted from Pillow, by Li-Young Lee

Josh Dorman lives and works in New York City. He received an undergraduate degree from Skidmore College and an MFA from Queens College in New York. He has exhibited in galleries across the country. His work has been reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, The New Yorker, Art Forum and ArtNews, and is in a number of prestigious private and public collections.