Joe Montgomery's 'Head, Calves' Exhibition at Laurel Gitlen Features Upcycled Paintings and Animation

Joe Montgomery presented his exhibition 'Head, Calves' at Laurel Gitlen gallery from October 26 through December 21, 2014. Located at 122 Norfolk Street in New York, the show featured a series of paintings with titles like Image Two Hundred Forty Seven and Image Two Hundred Eleven. These works incorporated diverse materials including cedar, paper, canvas, plaster, grout, plastic, sheet metal, MDF, and Coroplast, often appearing as collaged constructions. Montgomery's approach transformed discarded studio scraps into cohesive artworks, with surfaces ranging from rubbery textures resembling torn linoleum to layered pastes where individual components became indistinguishable. The exhibition included Image Two Hundred Sixty Five, an animation featuring a stick figure made from shims that stumbles and twirls while paint oozes from it, drawing comparisons to Hans Namuth's film of Jackson Pollock. This marked Montgomery's second show at Laurel Gitlen following his 2010 exhibition 'Lie lay lain; Lay laid laid,' demonstrating an evolution toward more exaggerated and less seamless material integrations. The paintings deliberately exposed their construction methods, with visible stitches and sutures where materials like metal and wood reinforced older painting elements. Alexandra Nicolaides reviewed the exhibition for artcritical.com, noting how Montgomery's work blurs distinctions between human creation and manufactured objects through material fusion.