Tchotchke Gallery is proud to present Danny Sobor’s debut New York solo exhibition, entitled Icons. Live-painted in the back of a small town Michigan gallery, Sobor fuses together two often polarizing subjects, the internet and personal faith, in this fresh body of work. Owing its name to both religious icon painting and vector graphics, the exhibition and artist call back to the figures of Old Testament angels as intermediaries between digital and physical worlds. 

In this presentation of eight new works, Sobor explores anxieties about technology and faith, in terms of what is true through media consumption and how painting can meaningfully engage with that in 2023. With an emphasis on thematic absurdity, paired with a sardonic approach to visual culture, Sobor works through his convictions and doubts with a devoted, labor-intensive methodology. In creating these works, Sobor became fanatically committed to the process and often crossed over into what he referred to as “a trance,” frequently kneeling for hours over countless days in their creation.

Informing Sobor’s theological imagery and approach, old archetypal symbols such as angels and doves are rendered as flat white stock vectors, signifiers made vacant. According to the artist, “I’m trying to express ideological culture wars by schizophrenically mashing signifiers until a piece feels like it articulates my confusion and frustration. The pieces aren’t non-committal as much as they are doubtful and searching.” 

Icons by Danny Sobor will be on view from February 14th, 2023 through March 18th, 2023 at Tchotchke Gallery, located at 311 Graham Avenue. The opening reception for the exhibition will be held from 6-8pm on Tuesday, February 14th. 

About the Work

“These paintings were made in a small beach town in southwest Michigan as I engaged in psychic warfare with boaters on a semi-daily basis. Live painting for Midwestern tourists. To typecast these politically is to already admit defeat and live in hell. Here are some image inputs: the Czarna Madonna icon seen in Polish Catholic houses I grew up in, the European Union flag, Ahegao Eyes, Russian war propaganda comics from the ’40s, a trail cam video of an antelope being attacked by hyenas from Yandex images, Hans Feuer 80’s fashion photography, AI-generated landscapes. Some of these pieces ooze a psychosexual blackness, others invite you in with pop colors only to repel when you look them in the eye. One is just a nice painting of swans. Do I really want AI to make art? Nick Land is a meme but he might be right about how our tech experiment ends. I like airbrush paintings but I use oil. Angels, doves, and horses are present motifs: old archetypes. They are rendered as flat white stock vectors, signifiers made vacant in summoning spell configurations. The paintings are aware of their absurdity: why would anyone paint these? These are the first paintings I’ve made that make me laugh. Sometimes painting in the morning when the first cups of black tea blood rushed I would also tear up. I use four colors. They all tone blue. Screen clear crystals materialized on canvas. At 30 I’m developing back pain from long hours of painting. A cynic could call it a lack of religion in my life, but it may be devotion and even earnestness nonetheless.”

About Danny Sobor 

Danny Sobor (b. 1992) is a self-taught oil painter born in Chicago. He received a B.F.A. in cognitive aesthetics from Brown University in 2015. Spending most of his adult life in Detroit, his exposure to techno and vacancy shaped his belief in futurism. This is his first solo show in New York. 

Previous exhibitions include 10 Warm Months, Playground Detroit, Detroit, Michigan; Ultra Light Beams, Mount Analogue Gallery, Seattle, Washington; The Printer’s Devil, The Scarab Club, Detroit, Michigan; Joined/Fading, Galerie F, Chicago, Illinois; The Korean Contemporary Printmakers Association Annual Exhibition, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea. Butterfly Effect, Tchotchke Galley, New York, New York. 

Press

Peggy, Artist Spotlight: Danny Sobor
Yale University, Museum of Non-Visible Art, Danny Sobor: Interview with Brainard Carey