John Knuth’s creative conjurings challenge traditional notions of art making, even in this millennium. His paintings force extreme tension between the sacred and the profane, creating stunning works by way of indelicate techniques. Knuth’s mission is to take something traditionally regarded as base, and to make it into something magnificent, where the materials feel secondary to the radical result. Knuth’s approach is alchemical. Like an art world diviner, he conjures the elements, making burn paintings with distress flares and metallic space blankets to using fly regurgitation to make the most incandescent, shimmering paintings. He has perfected his process using flyspeck, which might very well fall within the art historical continuum of the Pre-Raphaelites’ Mummy Brown paint or Chris Ofili’s elephant dung.
John Knuth received an M.F.A from the University of Southern California and a B.F.A from the University of Minnesota. John Knuth currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA
