Look at all your stuff

The artwork of Noah Lyon is energetic, visceral and direct. A Picasso spirit lives in Lyon’s work, not consciously or by active reference but via a combination of brute instinct, intimacy and intuitive play on various subject matters. His drawings offer a unique realism through an honest and poetic melee of personal reasoning and experience, combined with an absurdist celebration of American socio-political dysfunction.

As a second generation student of Bauhaus professor Joseph Albers, Lyon incorporates Albers’ color theories of internal and deceptive logic. His work bursts with an explosion of color even when he is working in black and white.

Lyon’s imagery often represents visual translations of verbal metaphors and puns, like the timeless works of Hieronymous Bosch. Lyon spills his wild imagination and comedic sense onto paper, canvas, and encapsulates it in one inch buttons. Like Bosch his works are dense with content, demonic delights, moral judgements and social criticism. They are ripe with madness and created with a religious fervour.

Another Northern Renaissance artist that influences Lyon’s practice is Peter Bruegel the Elder aka ’Bruegel the Peasant’. Lyon, also known as Doctor Ninja the Cultural Critic, finds inspiration through all levels of social strata. He keeps his ear to the streets and the energy of urban life and popular culture pulsates through his drawings. In his latest work he depicts just a few of the millions of characters he has encountered in his hometown of New York. Like Breugel’s peasant landscapes Lyon brings us a sea of humanity. They are drawings in which we are likely to find someone we know, maybe even ourselves.

For his second Swedish solo exhibition ”Look At All Your Stuff” that’s what Noah Lyon wants us to do. Consider everything. Look at our environment, Look at our politics, Look at our economy. Look at ourselves and laugh.

Noah Lyon is a graduate of the Cooper Union School for the Advancement of Science and Art. His artist books are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and Tate Britain libraries. His Retard Riot buttons can been found at art museums internationally including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago MOCA and Malmö Konsthall. To get a glimpse of his prolific output visit his website at http://retardriot.com