Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present the gallery’s first exhibition with Los Angeles based artist Math Bass. Titled Desert Veins, the exhibition will be on view from January 23rd to March 6th, 2021. Marking the artist’s first body of work composed of oil paint — the exhibition introduces a significant shift in medium, technique, mannerism, and possibility. Continuing to utilize their signature visual lexicon of symbols and shapes, Bass challenges and softens the notably graphic composition(s) found throughout the artist’s previous bodies of work. Along with the appearance of hand-painted gestures and an enhanced sensuality amongst the artist’s personal semiotics, Bass allows for a wider range of symbolism, as well as an intentionally spiritual angle to come through their already ambitious and cosmological practice. Within these additional levels of engagement, Bass creates a visceral sense of forgiveness towards the rigor of maintaining a hard-edge universe, conveying a more ‘irreplaceable moment’ within their expressive powers.

In the writer William J. Simmons’ words:

“If one wanted to be very art historical about it, Math Bass’ work resembles Gustave Caillebotte’s Floor Scrapers (1875) with its beautiful detritus and bones and dust and longing bodies and skin-as-paint-as-floor and new life emerging from every crevice. The predecessor for both Bass and Caillebotte might be the darkly excessive and comical “unswept floor” mosaics by the Ancients, paintings of castaway fruit and bones to prove that you were rich enough to eat heartily. Yet the art historical always seems smug, paranoid, dissecting, and penetrating in a non-consensual way. Art history relies on reductive biomorphism and it relies on an identity politics that has no room to dream, no lustful orifices that spew forth heretofore unimagined, tentacled shapes. Art history aims to fill all holes when those holes might prefer to remain agape or to be filled only with fluids and gasses. Art history hates bottoms.”

Math Bass (b. 1981, New York, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, performance, sculpture, and video. They received a BA from Hampshire College and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include: Various Small Fires, Seoul (2019-2020); Tanya Leighton, Berlin (2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Mary Boone Gallery, New York (2018); The Jewish Museum, New York (2017); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2017); and MoMA PS1, New York (2015). Bass has also participated in selected group exhibitions at Martos Gallery, New York (2019); Fredericks & Freiser, New York (2019); Gordon Robichaux, New York (2018); and the Made in L.A. Biennial at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, (2012). They will have a solo exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, Seattle in Fall 2021 – Winter 2022. Their work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, CA; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China.