Chez Max et Dorothea is pleased to present a two-person exhibition featuring John Byrtle and Nicky Lesser at our Los Angeles headquarters. The exhibition will open on Thursday, June 6th, and run until August 3rd. Please join us for an opening reception on Thursday, June 6th, from 6 pm to 9 pm to celebrate the works of John Byrtle and Nicky Lesser.

John Byrtle will present a new series of their ongoing stamp works, which explore themes of accumulation, visual overwhelm, and autonomy within a post-authorial lens. Byrtle’s stamp works combine multiple traditions of drawing, collage, printmaking, and painting to create rich and dense visual tableaux. These stamp works, often with multiple titles, demand the eye’s attention as a tour de force of looking.

The works are created from the hands of various stamp authors, a collection Byrtle began in 2016, which now stands as a likely candidate for the world's largest stamp collection, with far over 10,000 stamps. These pieces function as both archival treasures and subversive embodiments of craft and consumption. The stamp works become assemblages of various authors, transformed by Byrtle's active imagination, reminiscent of a Pop-ified Bosch or Bruegel landscape. These new works engage in situ within the exhibition space, making various interventions to the space’s architecture and presenting alongside paneled works that reveal a plurality of inhabitation.

Nicky Lesser will premiere a new sculpture series entitled Rug Dogs, alongside her ongoing series of sculpted bricks transformed into scaled-down furniture. Rug Dogs explores various states of leisure and repose, playing with classical motifs of sculpture rendered in common materials. Instead of chiseled, slick stone, aluminum foil armatures and bathmats are used to depict man’s best friend: the dog.

Lesser approaches her practice as an idiosyncratic study of human daily dependencies and emotional connections, whether through furniture, which she carves from literal bricks, or through the longstanding loyal canine companions of humans. “These sculptures are about emotions... seeking comfort in an ‘other,’” says the artist, reflecting on the Rug Dogs series. In this emotional context, one can see not only the obsession with the dog as an emotional support animal but also the connection to the long and varied cultural history of rag dolls. A sewn-together doll, typically passed from mother to child, provides comfort and well-wishes in times of insecurity or during dark nights of the unknown as early proven in the controversial experiments of psychologist Harry Harlow.

Together, Byrtle and Lesser’s works create a palpable world brimming with sensations of joy while subtly critiquing the world around us. Whether addressing the rising accumulation of material, the inherent importance of domesticity in their practice, or the long line of car traffic that borders the exhibition space, a question is posed to the audience. Is it a question similar to the one Jean-Luc Godard posed in his first 3-D shot film, Adieu au Langage (Goodbye to Language), or is it more demure, more innocent, like a low-humming growl?