Martos Gallery is pleased to present New Traditionalists, a group exhibition featuring works by
American artists Justin Adian, Jess Fuller, Leif Ritchey, and B. Wurtz, organized by Mary Grace
Wright.
Justin Adian (b. 1976, Fort Worth, TX) manipulates painterly surfaces into playful psychosexual
conglomerations. Canvas is wrapped tightly around bulbous upholsterer's foam and sprayed with
sleek industrial paint, its contours overlapping in tantalizing ways.
Jess Fuller’s (b. 1972, Portland, ME), hand dyed fabric paintings have evolved into plush sculptural
reliefs. These distressed canvases are both stued and dismembered, exploiting and exposing the
material’s structural limits. Fuller presents these sprawling, colorful hides in various formats, shapeshifting
from wall to oor, image to text.
Leif Ritchey (b. 1975 Ann Arbor, MI) uses chance operations and intuition to dictate materials and
compositions in his otherwise formally conservative paintings. Owing to its discarded fabrics,
papers, plastics, each work could have only come to be in its particular time and place. This
clairvoyant encounter results in assemblages eliciting tangles of narrative both concrete and
imagined.
B. Wurtz (b. 1948, Pasadena, CA) personalizes mass-produced objects, refashioning the formal
strategies of constructivism to suit his own modest, introspective vision. This exhibition contains
similar works spanning from 1979 to 1999, exemplifying his long-term exploration of recurring
motifs. The use of nostalgic triggers (the suggestion of Christmas ornaments, the obsolete
technology of 35mm