PHILADELPHIA - Tiger Strikes Asteroid is pleased to announce the opening of its October exhibition, Start to Move, featuring new work by New York based artist Alex Paik.

“Start to Move” is a song from post-punk band Wire’s seminal album, Pink Flag. Trouser Press said of the album: “The group manipulated classic rock song structure by condensing them into brief, intense explosions of attitude and energy.” Similarly, Alex Paik’s new small-scale paper assemblages feel like dense clusters of brightly colored forms that threaten to simultaneously explode and collapse. The new work hugs the line between being tightly composed and loosely improvised and recall the early formal experiments of the 60s and 70s and the inventive abstraction of Paul Klee or, more recently, Thomas Nozkowski . There is a sweetness about the work in the twee color palette and the toy-sized scale, but at the same time a fuck-all swagger in the laughably lo-fi paint handling and angular, chopped up forms.

Alex Paik received his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and his BFA from Penn State University. He was the founder and director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid and currently lives and works in New York. He has shown throughout the United States, including a recent solo exhibition at U-Turn Art Space in Cincinnati, OH and a group show called Get on the Block at Camel Art Space in Brooklyn, NY.