PHILADELPHIA – Tiger Strikes Asteroid is pleased to announce the opening of its September exhibition, Playground Counterpoint, featuring new work by Alex Paik.

Not even as children do we avoid conflict. Though the word “playground” surely conjures up images of fun and camaraderie, many of us just as clearly remember – on the very ground meant for frivolity; as a counterpoint to our studies – bullying and intimidation.

In this season of memories of schoolyards and playgrounds, Paik’s new work evokes that mostly jubilant place, with its residual tinge of the danger in abandon. The term playground is itself conflicted – it is a place of play, of loose experimentation, but there are definite limits: the most obvious being the area of the fenced ground. And both the uninhibited functions, as well as those lessons knocked into us – equal aspects of a playground aesthetic; as a place to raise a visual ruckus – are educational and stretching.

The joyous colors, textures, shapes and materials, simultaneously reminiscent of Richard Tuttle, Elizabeth Murray, Phillip Taafe or Playskool, may seem almost spastic and feverish when seen in a close group. But for each Day-Glo color; for every childlike shape, there is a twin sense of deeply felt order and contemplation. It is here that Paik draws upon the structure of a fugue to refine the feverishness to a rich and altering conversation.

Alex Paikholds an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, and has been exhibiting his work around the country for the last several years, most recently at the Marwen School Gallery in Chicago, Bridgette Mayer Gallery in Philadelphia, and Pocket Utopia in Brooklyn. In 2007, his work was featured in New American Paintings. He is also a founding member and acting director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid.