Weird Kid

Jeff Hallbauer

November 5 to December 4, 2021

Deluge Contemporary Art is pleased to present the first Victoria exhibition by Vancouver’s Jeff Hallbauer, representing the artist’s prodigious output under quarantine and covid. Weird Kid is a series of phenomenological field notes as paintings, encapsulating both interior landscapes and the natural exterior world via the innate understanding of a superb and joyful colourist harnessing the gestural energy of emotional notation.

Phenomenologically, painting can electrify the body, and stimulate emotion. My paintings attempt to project happiness and are intended to read queer. They demonstrate within them pure colour, and are supported by theory on painting as a readymade, using pigments straight from the tube, representing brightness true to their material source in the rainbow spectrum.

Jeff Hallbauer is an interdisciplinary painter based on unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and Sel̓íl̓witulh Nations. Hallbauer graduated from Emily Carr University in 2009 and has exhibited locally and abroad. Some notable exhibitions include Fruits at Chernoff Fine Art and Towards a Fictional History of Colour at the Burrard Art Foundation. In 2020 he participated in the Queer Arts Festival as part of an Avram Finkelstein flash collective experiment in political art-making, which showed at the Grunt Gallery community art screen. Halbauer collaborated with Swiss artist Dawn Nilo’s "Performing Negotiations" as part of the 2020 Swiss Art Awards.