Opening Reception:
Saturday, February 23rd
4-6 pm
Scott Covert's paintings celebrate our celebrity culture. For the last 25 years, he has traveled across the country and Europe creating paintings that pay tribute to the artists, actors, musicians, and entertainers who created American popular culture. His work expands and updates Andy Warhol's ideal of celebrity and fame.
As a young artist who moved to New York in the 70s, Covert found himself a part of the downtown club scene where art and celebrity came together to dance, dine, and create mischief. During the eighties, he worked with a legendary party planner helping to place A-lister next to A-lister. Scott Covert is still arranging the places at the table, but now he collects stars on his canvas.
His medium is frottage—or stone rubbing. He travels from city to city, stopping at cemeteries where his favorite talents lie in state. He transfers names onto his canvases by doing rubbings directly from headstones. He sees his process as a type of pilgrimage—a way to pay lasting respect to the people who shaped our culture.
Some paintings have specific themes, such as the Rat Pack or the Three Stooges. Others offer an assortment of talents from high and low culture, combining legendary stars such as Rita Heyworth and Humphrey Bogart with slapstick comedians, jazz musicians with graffiti artists.
Covert refers to his paintings as "Dinner Parties of the Dead." The guests at his banquets on canvas include all types of cultural icons—movie stars, explorers, directors, writers, politicians, artists, heroes and villains, athletes, rock stars and inventors. These individuals have used their skills and talents to become immortal. In Covert's paintings their celebrity has become eternal.