The iconoclastic Los Angeles artist Llyn Foulkes died on 21 November at age 91. A Renaissance man who resisted the rote taxonomy of style, Foulkes was a painter, jazz musician, filmic muse and artwork world troublemaker, bucking the industrial commodification of his observe all through his lengthy profession. His assorted, anarchic observe, which he termed “constantly inconsistent”, didn’t at all times endear him to the artwork institution, however his trailblazing legacy units him aside as a paragon of originality. Kent High quality Artwork, a gallery in New York that had revealed a number of books of Foulkes’s work, introduced his loss of life in a e-newsletter.
Foulkes was born in 1934 in Yakima, Washington. He studied artwork and music on the Central Washington School of Schooling in Ellensburg till he was drafted into the US Military in 1954. After serving two years in Germany, he relocated to Los Angeles in 1957 to attend the Chouinard Artwork Institute, an artwork college finest identified for its long-standing relationship with Walt and Roy Disney and regarded an incubator of animators.
As a scholar at Chouinard, Foulkes started exhibiting with the influential Ferus Gallery and, in 1962, had his first institutional solo present on the Pasadena Artwork Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum). His early work flirted with the surface edges of the Pop Artwork motion, incorporating the iconography of postcards, classic panorama pictures and Route 66-inspired signage as a method to discover the failed guarantees of the Hollywood machine. In 1964, the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork, then nonetheless underneath building, was the primary establishment to amass his work for its everlasting assortment. Ten years later, he was the topic of his first profession retrospective on the Newport Harbor Artwork Museum (now the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Artwork).
The Nineteen Seventies additionally marked a interval of musical experimentation for Foulkes. He performed drums in a band known as Metropolis Lights from 1965 to 1971, and based his personal mission, the Rubber Band, in 1973. He additionally carried out solo as “The Machine”, a one-man protest of America’s imperial overreach and company politics that he performed on a big do-it-yourself contraption made from horns, percussive and xylophone parts. In 2004, he launched an album of unique songs known as Llyn Foulkes and His Machine: Stay on the Church of Artwork.
Following the receipt of a significant award for portray on the 1967 Paris Biennial and a 1977 Guggenheim Fellowship, Foulkes grew to become involved that his work had been too formulaic and simply accessible, shifting his work into extra explicitly political territory. Within the Nineteen Eighties, Foulkes started to include cloth tableaux into his photos and infrequently included the determine of Mickey Mouse, a recurring image for company cultural conditioning. In certainly one of his most well-known items, POP (1985-90), Foulkes depicts himself as a father hypnotised by a tv set whereas his son reads the pledge of the Mickey Mouse Membership. In 1995’s I Thought Artwork Was Particular (Mickey and Me), the mouse seems as a tumor on the artist’s mind.
Foulkes obtained the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in 2008 and the Artists’ Legacy Basis Award the next yr. Starting in 2013, he was the topic of a large-scale touring exhibition that originated on the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles then was offered on the New Museum in New York and the Museum Kurhaus Kleve in Germany. In 2011 he participated within the Venice Biennale and the next yr was featured in Documenta in Kassel, Germany. Final yr, the New York gallery A Hug From The Artwork World mounted a survey of his work, spanning never-before-seen cartoons from his teenage years to more moderen works made in protest of the warfare in Ukraine.
Two of Foulkes’s largest and most bold works, The Misplaced Frontier (1997-2004) and Deliverance (2004-07), are featured in a documentary concerning the artist, Llyn Foulkes One Man Band (2013), directed by Tamar Halpern and Chris Quilty. The documentary consists of, amongst different interviewees, the late actor and photographer Dennis Hopper, and portrays Foulkes as a “lovable, cranky, and sensible outsider” in accordance with The New York Instances.
