Dike Blair

Dike Blair (born 1952) is a New York-based artist, writer and teacher. His art consists of two parallel bodies of work: intimate, photorealistic paintings and installation-like sculptures assembled from common objects—often exhibited together—which examine overlooked and unexceptional phenomena of daily existence in both a romantic and ironic manner. Blair emerged out of the late 1970s New York art scene, and his work relates to concurrent movements such as the Pictures Generation, Minimalism and conceptual art, while remaining distinct from and tangential to them. New York Times critic Roberta Smith places his sculpture in a "blurred category" crossing "Carl Andre with ikebana, formalist abstraction with sleek anonymous hotel rooms, talk-show sets with home furnishings showrooms."

Early career Blair was born in 1952 in New Castle, Pennsylvania. This work evolved into more widely known installations, such as his 1991 show at Ealan Wingate, based around photographs he took at Disney's Epcot. The show featured mixed-media images installed in a darkened room scored to Muzak, and decorated and carpeted in mauve with plants and suburban benches; reviews described it, alternately, as suffused with loss and nostalgia, soothing, and surprisingly spiritual.

Dike Blair, Untitled, Gouache, pastel and pencil on paper, 12" x 9", 2016. Blair's work has been shown at the Whitney Museum, Secession (Vienna), Weatherspoon Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and Centre Pompidou; it belongs to the collections of the Whitney, Brooklyn Museum, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009 and the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome in 2010. He lives in New York with his wife, costume designer Marie Abma. His realistic, deadpan paintings (primarily untitled, painted in gouache, and derived from his own snapshots) are more literal, yet illusionistic; the Postminimal, installation-like sculpture is abstract, but concrete and painterly.

Dike Blair, to want to, Painted wood, carpet, rubber mat, fluorescent fixtures, vinyl, Duratrans, 22" (h) x 150" (w) x 92" (d), 2005. Blair's earlier gouaches focus on diaristic, largely American scenes (bedside set-ups, cocktails, cigarette butt-littered ashtrays, soda cans, VHS tapes) and anodyne transitory environments (motels, lounges, lobbies, Las Vegas, Disneyland) that Roberta Smith characterizes as background and details at "the edges of a sophisticated, travel-weary terrain." Village Voice critic Jerry Saltz writes that the paintings combine "a draftsman's attention to fact, a botanist's eye for type, and a detective's feel for telling clues," resulting in a no-man's-land genre "between illustration, photography, and forensic science." For the survey, "Dike Blair: Now and Again" (Weatherspoon Art Museum, 2009), he produced a subtly staged and lit experience involving two sculpture courts—mirror layouts to one another invoking the space in its entirety—that flanked a series of galleries housing his gouaches; Artforum described the show as an intimate and uncanny meditation on experiencing versus seeing, real versus illusionistic space.

In 2017, Blair suspended his work on sculpture and took up oil painting. The subjects of those paintings are consistent which his gouaches—sometimes the same image—but the oils have a different physicality, including very slight impasto and intaglio. Around the same time, he began producing drawings, something that had not previously been part of his practice. ARTnews, Art Press, Bomb, Harpers, and Parkett, and served as contributing and associate editor for the Parisian magazine Purple, writing about design, music, technology, film, art and architecture. Blair taught in the painting department at Rhode Island School of Design from 1997 to 2017, as well as at Art Institute of Boston, New York University, and University of Las Vegas.

Awards and public collections Blair has received a John S. Guggenheim Fellowship (2009), the American Academy in Rome Prize (2010), and fellowships from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation (1995) and Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation/National Endowment for the Arts (1988). His work belongs to the public collections of the Whitney Museum, Musee Des Beaux Arts La Chaux De Fonds (Switzerland), MUMOK (Vienna), Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Portland Art Museum, and Weatherspoon Art Museum, among others.