Hollywood, Los Angeles
Will Stovall
Lifeworld Variations
Château ShattoChâteau Shatto is pleased to present Lifeworld Variations, the gallery’s first exhibition with Washington, D.C.–based artist Will Stovall. Stovall’s new paintings build on the concept of the Lifeworld — the phenomenological idea of a shared ground shaped by culture, language, and everyday practice. Painted in acrylic on machined and welded aluminum, each work forms a discrete world in which scenes of social life unfold within constructed perspectives. Combining abstract forms and concrete visual depiction, they explore the morphologies of our collective life, its internal histories and imagined boundaries. The scenography of Stovall’s paintings is built into sculptural structures that fix a perspective and define a point of view. Their format poses a question: how does our subjectivity encounter the collective? Each work holds together multiple viewpoints, yet as viewers we can only occupy one at a time. This condition of seeing becomes a model for how individual perspectives coexist within a shared world, as politics depends on shared understandings and mutual intelligibility. In these works, Stovall is drawn to social environments that are situated between allegory and the real. A mythologically inflected view of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., folds into itself, settling between a tangible site and an abstract idea of our body politic. In another work, the structure of the Lifeworld finds its form in a stereoscopic apparatus, where painting, sculpture and optical device elide into one object — and one illusory image. More broadly, Stovall’s work connects with historical painting traditions through visual idiom and structural form, including modernist responses to classical pathos formulae, postwar shaped-canvas painting, and visual motifs and metaphors drawn from philosophical romanticism and critical theory. By situating his practice within this broader tradition of visual culture, Stovall creates objects that probe how we visually relate to knowledge of ourselves and the world. Will Stovall (b. 1983, Washington, D.C.) received an MFA in Painting from Bard College and a PhD in German Languages and Literature from Yale University. He has lectured at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and The Phillips Collection, as well as at Yale University, Princeton University, and George Washington University, where he teaches painting and the theory of art. His paintings have been exhibited at Ulrik, New York, and have been published in Oxford German Studies and Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies. Lifeworld Variations is his first solo exhibition with Château Shatto.