Tony Tasset

Conceptual artist Tony Tasset’s new series of paintings and sculptures, Me and My Arrow, references the Harry Nilsson song of the same title and shows his continued interest in using pop sensibility to tap into shared visual knowledge. Tasset has said his goal for the series was to create a universal logo that expressed the contemporary environment of chronic evaluation—a graphic emblem of trending. Arrow Sculpture, from this series, depicts one arrow facing up and the other down. Although the arrows are uniform in size, they are painted in a range of color combinations and are meant to reference the art market, changing tastes, and the sometimes arbitrary nature of assessment. As critic Lori Waxman has recently written, the series “takes aim at the stock market, the art market, fashion magazine hot lists, the thumbs up and thumbs down of social media postings. . . . Normally this trending is all so abstract, so flat, so digital, it can be hard to get a grip on. Here it gains concrete, Technicolor, winsome form.”

Born in 1960 in Cincinnati, Tasset received his BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati and his MFA from The School of the Art Institute in Chicago. He was selected as an artist for the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and has work in private and public collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt. Tasset lives and works in Chicago and is represented by Kavi Gupta Gallery.