P·P·O·W is delighted to present a solo installation of new works by Joe Houston for ADAA: The Art Show 2024. Since first exhibiting with the gallery in 1984, Houston has distilled timely environmental and social concerns into rigorously executed paintings and works on paper of commonplace, middle-American objects. Houston’s work, at its essence, signals a cautionary tale about societal, political, and ecological fragility, offering finely calibrated provocations and laments for our perilous age.

Exactingly composed to evoke canonical art historical themes, Houston arrives at his deceptively straightforward subject matter through years of iterative preparatory paintings and drawings. He then renders his compositions on unprimed fine-weave linen in successive layers of monochrome and polychrome underpainting. Houston's thorough process rewards close viewing and enables extrapolation on his evocative, iconic imagery.

Rich with allusion, each of Houston’s symbolist paintings reveal close examinations of persistent injustices and their disturbing cultural recurrence. In Safe, 2024, Houston reflects on the politicization of migration in America, depicting a small yellow birdhouse perched atop an unstable pole, confined on all sides by fencing. Functioning as an allegory of painting, Votive, 2024, depicts a struck match as a metaphor for the fraught effort to articulate form and imbue the nebulous space of painting with literal and metaphorical illumination. As such, this work, like many of Houston’s paintings, functions as both cultural commentary and an intimate self-portrait. Mercy, 2024, and Composition, 2024, subtly evoke the beginnings of Houston’s artistic practice as a gay man coming of age during the AIDS crisis. Now in his early sixties, Houston continues to dissect the distinctly American omnipresence of social scapegoating and cultural censorship.

Joe Houston (b. 1962) pursued undergraduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and earned his MFA from Northwestern University’s Department of Art Theory & Practice. He has presented three solo exhibitions with P·P·O·W in 1986, 1993 and 2021. His honors include an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell and the Bemis Foundation. Houston’s work is in numerous public collections including the Allen Memorial Arts Museum, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Progressive Collection, RISD Museum, Vehbi Koç Foundation, and Yale University Art Gallery.