Steven Hull

Steven Hull (born 1967) is an American artist based in Los Angeles. His projects cross boundaries typically drawn between personal and collaborative work, disciplines like painting, sculpture and installation art, and artistic fields including writing, music, art, illustration, design and performance. In his personal work, he frequently creates immersive, multimedia tableaux and exhibitions that Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight described as "carnivalesque hybrids of painting and sculpture whose chief aim is to turn visions of the conventional world upside down." He often mixes opposing artistic styles (e.g., expressionist figurative drawing and geometric abstraction), irreverent conceptual strategies, and tones that range from playful to alienated or politically pointed. he also co-founded the artist-run space La Cienegas Projects and established Nothing Moments Press, which produced and published "Nothing Moments", a set of 24 limited-edition book collaborations between writers, artists and designers. These projects have been presented at MOCA at the Pacific Design Center, Rosamund Felsen Gallery, and Festival Supreme, among other venues. He is married to artist Tami Demaree.

Early life and career Hull was born in Lakewood, California in 1967. He became interested in art in his late teens after being involved in theater and before committing to college, took classes and worked as an assistant at University of Texas for artists Robert Colescott, Mary Lovelace O'Neill and Michael Tracy. he was also featured in early solo shows at Galerie Rolf Ricke (Germany, 2002) and Angstrom Gallery curated by David Quadrini (Dallas, 2002–6) and group shows at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles Municipal Gallery, Neues Museum Nürnberg (Germany), and San Diego Museum of Art. His paintings and drawings oscillate between edgy, expressionist figurative works (involving carnival, erotic, sea or political themes) and geometric or lyrical abstraction; he often juxtaposes them with found objects and handmade, theatrical assemblage sculptures in exhibitions that may also include sound and motion. with publications such as Artforum and LA Weekly placing him among a younger generation of Los Angeles painters whose work nonchalantly and self-consciously disrupted modernist paradigms such as intentionality, the expressive "truth" of gesture, and rigid distinctions between abstraction and figuration. In personal and curatorial work (e.g., the exhibitions "Landscape Memories", 1999; "Are 'Friends' Electric?" 2001; and "Painful Giggles", 2004, which included works made with his children), Hull pursued irreverent conceptual and presentation strategies (e.g., multiple panels, stacked canvasses) that complicated or subverted traditional genres and gallery practices. He offered the former with Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! Unbelievable! (2015–6), a glass vitrine with a childlike orange sailboat perched on rough-cut black and white waves and beckoned by two incongruous globular pink breasts. Christopher Knight described the centerpiece of his 2017 show, If Jesus Gives Us Everything We Want, We’ll Love Him, as a "sad, sinister, pitch-perfect lament for our troubled time" that "puts white nationalism and its perversion of authentic Christian values on sordid display."

For Song Poems (2000–01), Hull commissioned poems from 40 writers (among them, Rick Moody, Darcey Steinke and Lynne Tillman), which he turned over to musicians to use as lyrics for original songs that were given to artists, who created videos and album covers for them. The project yielded a 3-CD catalogue of 43 lyrics and songs, album art and posters, as well as performances and exhibitions at Cohan Leslie and Browne (New York), Angstrom Gallery and Rosamund Felsen; Its first major project was AB OVO (2005), for which Hull solicited 19 artists (among them, Mike Kelley, Martha Rosler and Bruce Yonemoto) to take the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2TM, a personality test used in the U.S. legal system to identify and evaluate psychological disorders. They began by requesting submissions of original novels, novellas and short stories. After narrowing to 24 works (by writers such as Aimee Bender, Ben Ehrenreich, Rachel Kushner, and Tom McCarthy), they turned them over to artists (e.g., Derek Boshier, Andrea Bowers, Glenn Ligon) for illustrations, and then to designers (e.g., Gail Swanlund) to create the finished books. Its projects from 2009 to 2011 are documented in a catalog, Las Cienegas Projects: Time Runs Out (2015). Hull organized a multimedia environment for "Glow," a one-night interactive art festival in Santa Monica in 2013; it featured a puppet show, sculpture by Hull and Demaree, and sounds by Gibby Haynes and music by Petra Haden, Tanya Haden and Anna Huff, which were captured on the album A Puppet Show.

In 2017, he participated in the "Murals of La Jolla" public art project with Man, Myths and Magic, a vibrant, billboard-sized reproduction of a five-by-seven-inch drawing of his, which combined abstract, referential and fantastical qualities in its depiction of a humanoid figures emerging from a surreal landscape.