Kerry Schuss Gallery

Press Release

Jack Pierson’s Five New Pieces are part of a larger body of assemblage work made during quarantine in his Ridgewood, Queens studio. Assemblage is actually not a bad word to describe Pierson’s overall practice of the last 30 years. Pierson's  ‘word pieces’ are inherently assemblage, his early verité installation pieces which shown in Soho in the 90’s also could sit comfortably under that heading. For the greater part of his exhibition history, he made use of a signature installation style that placed work up and down the walls and into the corners and usually included at least three mediums, drawing, photography, oftentimes wall painting.

These new works are different however although just as direct and true as we’ve come to expect Pierson’s work to be. As concise and terse as they are lyrical, they are nothing but assorted materials of a life being lived in a studio, merely pinned to the wall in the manner of an exotic insect collector, yet they are compelling in their monumentality and ability to evoke great abstract painting. Pierson has always been adept at producing work that is able to hold opposite emotional responses at the same time. 

Jack Pierson was born in 1960 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston in 1984. He lives and works in New York. Pierson has had recent solo exhibitions at the CAC Malaga, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and the Aspen Art Museum. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among other museums worldwide. Pierson is represented by Regen Projects (Los Angeles) and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (Paris).

Press