ADAM BERIS IN CONVERSATION WITH TIMO FAHLER
In celebration with the exhibition Fantastic Best Wishes, OCHI is pleased to present a conversation between artists Adam Beris and Timo Fahler, to take place at 3301 W Washington Blvd in Los Angeles, California on Saturday, June 1, 2024 at 5:00pm PST with an artists’ reception to follow from 6:00 to 7:00pm*.
BBQLA (2015-2018) was a collaborative migrating installation turned gallery co-founded by Adam Beris, Timo Fahler, and Thomas Linder. Beginning as pop-up exhibitions in a backyard shed, BBQLA moved into an industrial section of Boyle Heights, down the street from several commercial galleries and east of Downtown Los Angeles. Becoming a staple of the vibrant artist-run gallery scene, artists (and eventually curators, collectors, press…) flocked to see intimate and tightly curated group exhibitions in a gallery space built into the corner of an artist studio. Alex Becerra, Pau Pescador, Lauren Quin, Quinn Harrelson, and Andres Guerrero were among the many guest curators and exhibitions often featured a mix of both emerging artists and legendary ones—with wildly popular and well attended openings marked by long lines at BBQLA’s grill. Before unofficially ending in 2018, BBQLA organized several travelling exhibitions across the United States, founded an arts mentorship program for local teens called Meatgrinder, and had been featured in various publications including Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Architectural Digest, Cultured Magazine, W Magazine, Art Review, LA Weekly, Hyperallergic, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, and AUTRE.
Adam Beris (b. 1987, Milwaukee, WI) paints amalgamations of decontextualized imagery rooted in American consumerist culture, creating works that reflect desire and encapsulate the hunt for meaning within a fragmented landscape. Beris celebrates and disrupts the traditional relationships between object, subject, foreground, and background with unexpected (and abstract) paint applications—squeezing paint directly from tube to canvas, palette knifing shapes of paint, or adhering salvaged bits of failed paintings onto new surfaces.
Beris received a dual degree in Painting and Creative Writing from Kansas City Art Institute. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including Tang Contemporary Art and OTI in Hong Kong, China; Primary in Miami, FL; MCC Longview Cultural Center in Lee’s Summit, MO; The Omaha Creative Institute in Omaha, NE; and OCHI in Los Angeles, CA and Sun Valley, ID. Beris currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and is represented by OCHI.
Timo Fahler (b. 1978, Tulsa, OK) lives and works between Los Angeles and Amsterdam. Fahler works with utilitarian mediums to construct highly visual and culturally significant works. Combining formal elements of sculpture with references to his mixed heritage, Fahler’s work explores ideas of use and reuse through casting and manipulating found objects and combining them with relics and materials that relate to personal experiences. His restructuring of objects in a manner that indicates both function and meaning invokes a bricoleurian practice evident in his midwestern background, and representative of a multi-cultural aesthetic.
Fahler received his MFA from UCLA and his BFA from Kansas City Art Institute (KCAI). Fahler's work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions including at Hauser and Wirth, Sebastian Gladstone, Art Contemporary Los Angeles, and The Underground Museum in Los Angeles, CA; The Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum in Long Beach, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson in AZ; Gamma Galeria in Guadalajara, Mexico; and 56 Henry in New York, NY.