Road Agent is proud to announce the opening of New Art from Chicago, featuring work by Scott Anderson, Aaron Baker, John Parot, and Steve Reber.

Despite its title, this show is based on a social rather than a geographic locus; that is, that specific social networks and affinities draw certain artists together, pooling sympathetic aesthetics. The artists currently live and work in Chicago, and indeed, these four are friends, but more importantly they share an aesthetic “blood-type”, leading to a kind of innate curation.

The result is a show of new works in various media—including sculpture, painting, and works on paper—presenting an ease in each other’s company. Collectively, the works straddle the natural and the synthetic: see Steve Reber’s wood-grain laminate, Aaron Baker’s biomorphic abstractions in plastic paint, John Parot’s neo-primitive neon masks painted on magazine cut outs, and Scott Anderson’s hyper-saturated futurescapes.

In the work you find a nostalgia for the future as imagined in the 1970s and ‘80s along with a desire to smash together as many cool ideas as possible. Both are elements of what it was like to be a guy growing up on steady diet of science fiction and fantasy, with an aptitude for working with one’s hands and the raw need to just make something.