Thaddeus Strode ─ Absolutes and Nothings

Thaddeus Strode’s vibrant large-scale paintings are universes unto themselves: wild mash-ups of California surf and skateboard culture, Zen philosophy, rock music, literature, film, and comic books. Absolutes and Nothings marks the artist’s first major museum show, presented as part of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum’s Contemporary Projects series.?
?Strode’s images draw on a wealth of motifs inspired by a broad range of sources in popular culture, freely combined with the artist’s own creations. The strength and visual pleasure of Strode’s aesthetic come from his self-reflexive combination of painterly styles and incongruous elements, in which enigmatic texts, phantoms, monsters, and castaways play off one another to produce cryptic—and captivating—fantasies. Including over two dozen full-color images of works from 2001 to the present, as well as essays by Sabine Eckmann, Meredith Malone, and Benjamin Weissman, Absolutes and Nothings is a fascinating premier monograph from one of our most vital and exciting contemporary visual artists.

Sabine Eckmann is director of and chief curator at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, where she also teaches in the Department of Art history and Archaeology. Meredith Malone is assistant curator at the Kemper Art Museum and has contributed to several exhibition catalogs. Benjamin Weissman is the author of two books of short fiction and a frequent contributor to Frieze and the Los Angeles Times Book Review.