Dike Blair

Interviews by Brainard Carey

Dike Blair (b. 1952, New Castle, Pennsylvania) uses gouache, oil, his own photographs, and strategies appropriated from Postminimalist sculpture to create intimate tableaux that transform quotidian sights and materials into exercises in formalism. A writer and teacher as well as an artist, Blair came up in the downtown scene of 1970s New York among punk rockers and Postmodernists. In the early 1980s, against prevailing art world trends toward Neo-Expressionism, he began rendering scenes from his life in gouache on paper. These ongoing diaristic paintings are devoid of human figures but nonetheless evoke the specter of the artist whose daily life plays out at a remove across their finely-wrought surfaces. Blair lives in New York and Sullivan County.

Blair’s recent solo exhibitions include Edward Hopper House, Nyack, New York (2024); Karma (Los Angeles, 2023, New York, 2022); Various Small Fires, Seoul (2020); The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2019); Linn Lühn, Düsseldorf (2019); Secession, Vienna (2016); and Jüergen Becker Gallery, Hamburg (2016). In 2022, Karma presented an exhibition of Blair’s paintings of Gloucester alongside Edward Hopper’s paintings of the same small Massachusetts city. Blair’s work is featured in the collections of the Whitney Museum, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others. Blair’s work is on view in Matinee: Dike Blair at Edward Hopper House, Nyack, New York through October 27, 2024 and at Karma, New York through October 26, 2024.

Dike Blair, Untitled, 2024, Gouache, pencil and chalk on paper, 15 x 20 inches, 38.1 x 50.8 cm, 16 5/8 x 21 5/8 inches, 42.23 x 54.93 cm (framed), © Dike Blair. Courtesy the artist and Karma.

Dike Blair, Untitled, 2024, Gouache, pencil and chalk on paper, 15 x 20 inches, 38.10 x 50.80 cm, 16 5/8 x 21 5/8 inches, 42.23 x 54.93 cm (framed), © Dike Blair. Courtesy the artist and Karma.

Dike Blair, Untitled, 2024, Oil on aluminum panel, 28 1/8 x 21 1/8, 71.44 x 53.66 x 2.54 cm, 28 3/4 x 21 3/4 inches, 73.02 x 55.24 cm (framed), © Dike Blair. Courtesy the artist and Karma.