March 2006                                                                FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 Koplin Del Rio Gallery is pleased to announce Signs and Souvenirs, an exhibition featuring works by Fred Stonehouse in his fifth showing at the gallery.

“Like Holy Cards on LSD” is the way one viewer describes the recent work of painter Fred Stonehouse; a humorous, but oddly fitting remark, as there is something at once familiar and hallucinatory about these new paintings. This new body of work consisting of large canvas banner paintings as well as works on panel and paper is some of Stonehouse’s most inventive and ambitious work to date. Stonehouse paints with the abandon and unbridled imagination that is lost for most in youth and tempers it with sophistication and his characteristic haunting symbolism. 

In the painting “Rose Croix”, a robed crusader battles tentacles from a fiery well with blasts of energy from his sleeves.  The similarity to the popular image of St. George slaying the dragon isn’t quite obvious, but it is there nonetheless.  The heart of the appeal of this work is that one feels a sense of comfort at what appears, at first glance, to be a familiar image, only to be confronted with a quite surreal variant upon closer inspection.   Even in a piece as “off the hook” as “Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott (A mighty fortress is our God. – Martin Luther)” there is something about the presentation that hearkens back to the era of hand painted advertising and side show banners, making the fact that the image is of a girl, face blackened from fire and riding a large, phallic wiener rocket, somehow more approachable. 

Most of the pieces in this show contain title-like text as part of the image, suggesting to the viewer that there is a meaning to be deciphered, if only one could string together the clues.  This is not to say that these works are simple puzzles.  They are, first and foremost, paintings, complete with drips and corrections and over painting resulting in a slightly raw richness that is hard to describe.  The show is entitled Signs and Souvenirs, but these are signs of dimly remembered dreams and souvenirs from an ominous land.

Born in Milwaukee in 1960, Fred Stonehouse received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin.  His work has been shown in numerous galleries as well as several museum group exhibitions including the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Madison Art Center in Wisconsin, and the Cincinnati Art Center in Ohio. He currently resides just outside Milwaukee.