press release

Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present Iconographica, a series of new paintings on panel by Justin Margitich. The exhibition marks the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, and will be installed in our Viewing Room from May 15 through  June 19, 2021.

Repurposing the visual lexicon of Byzantine and early Russian Icon painting, Justin Margitich considers the formal and technical possibilities inherent in that tradition’s far-reaching language. Its express aesthetic influence largely excluded from discourses surrounding painting today, Icon painting stands among the earliest direct precedents of certain contemporary figurative and portrait modes that eschew likeness in favor of an essentialization of the subject through identifiable characteristics or attributes. Today, as society continues to fractalize and subdivide through visual, often commodifiable means, a return to Iconography as the Byzantines and their contemporaries understood it becomes both profoundly unfeasible and conceptually loaded. Margitich’s icons, would-be saints, abuzz with psychedelic auras and energies, arrive at the universal through carefully executed irreducibility. Their archetypical attributes of eyes, branches, fire, water, and wings suggest vestigial ways of seeing and understanding the contemporary painted figure in a moment of heightened individualism, where notions of identity and selfhood are rapidly shifting.   

While Margitich grew up steeped in this work–his mother is a Russian Orthodox Icon painter, and his father, a priest, has overseen a decades-long initiative to apply traditional Frescoes to the domed basilica and interiors of the church at which he presides–the artist, materially, formally and conceptually, initially turned away from it in earlier bodies of work. Mostly abstract, earlier works approached Icon painting’s metaphysical and mystical properties while abandoning its aesthetic entirely. Now availing himself not only of Icon painting’s visual trappings, but its signature egg tempera medium as well, the artist’s paintings become commentaries on the human condition that Icon painting often strived for but was frequently barred from on account of its specific religious mandate. Free from the limits of both religion and abstraction, the artist arrives at paintings whose inclusive understanding of the spiritual forces that animate the world invite cultural and interpersonal exchange. His humanist Icons make a case for the singularity of the rendered human spirit, and its consistency across cultural and physical hosts. 

In mixing his own egg tempera and originating his own Iconographic gestures and attributes, Margitich implies and argues for an expanded and updated understanding of a tradition and medium largely relegated to history. His Iconography is defined in elemental terms: a woman clutches a glowing branch, unaffected by fire. An androgynous figure stands in the center of a swirling wind. Hands and gazes introduce a language immediately understood, but reliably oblique in its lack of moralization, narrative, or prescribed significance. Instead, Margitich presents the Iconographic figure as endlessly rich with emotional possibility and charged, now as much as then, with meaning that transcends specific form and tradition. All painting is, perhaps, repainting; Margitich finds renewed possibility in tradition, and generosity in the suggestive possibilities of a tradition universally recognized, but not often fully reckoned with. 

Justin Margitich (b. 1984) received his BFA from California College of the Arts (CCA) in 2008, and his MFA from San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) in 2013. He lives and works in Santa Rosa, California.

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