Iké Udé

 “Paris Hilton: Fantasy & Simulacrum”

Opening reception: Thursday, December 11, 6 to 8 PM
        December 11 – January 24, 2009


“Fame comes in all manner of forms: There's Paris Hilton kind of fame, there’s Madonna, Mahatma Ghandi, Hitler, Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, Al Capone, Coco Chanel, Gorge Bush and Obama…  There's no ethical standard or moral yardstick by which to judge or measure the quality of fame—if there is, the line between fame and notoriety in our contemporary framework, is virtually a blur.”- Iké Udé

Stux Gallery, New York is pleased to announce “Paris Hilton: Fantasy and Simulacrum”, an exhibition of new paintings, sculptures and photographs by Nigerian born, American artist, publisher and style icon, Iké Udé. Through a myriad of modalities, Udé distills the rise of celebrity journalism and the ensuing media phenom that is Paris Hilton, America’s very own Princess Diana.

The premise of Fantasy and Simulacrum is a saucy, sexual, erotic conversation and engagement between the artist’s alter ego, Visconti, and Paris Hilton and is both a reference and departure to “Beyond Decorum,” Udé’s seminal conceptual photographic series of clothing and shoes paired with titillating text appropriated from adult personal advertisements. Utilizing a cacophony of visual material culled from gossip blogs, porn sites, wallpaper samples, fashion/lifestyle magazines and film, Udé employs free association and an absurd sense of humor in rendering works that manage to be both whimsical and monumental, confusing our conception of historical fact with salacious artistic interpretation.

Udé’s conceptual photo-based works will be informed by a series of mixed media paintings in which the artist investigates the aesthetics of cultural decay via a unique blend of acrylic paint, photocopies, mirror and burnt paper on wood. These thickly and elaborately layered paintings envisage two distinct visual languages, a poetic duality that succeeds in connecting a full on media blitz with the artist’s own primal mark making. Incorporating various sexual apparatus and a pleasing eclectic grouping of alternative surfaces onto which to apply his “alterations”, Udé expresses his fondness for fantasy and kink, making reference to both his own complex cultural narrative, as well as to societies susceptibility to the cyclical and sometimes ironically amusing demands of hot trends.

Iké Udé was born in Lagos, Nigeria and moved to the States in the 1980s.  His work is in the permanent collections of the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Smithsonian National Museum, Washington DC. Udé is the founder and publisher of aRUDE magazine, a quarterly devoted to art, culture, style and fashion. He is the author of Style File: The World’s Most Elegantly Dressed, a comprehensive monograph just released by Harper Collins.