In The Keep, a gate in the foreground guards a mysteriously exuberant world in which patterns cohabit unobstructed from barriers. The painting resembles Fake’s earlier drawings of reimagined façades of gay bars that no longer exist. Here, however, the space is not identified for one particular community, it’s for all.

Fake’s  detailed, abstract art is influenced by the curves and angles of architecture, early twentieth century design, fabrics, and artwork by the Chicago Imagists—a group of artists working after World War II who looked to comics, cartoons, and Surrealism for inspiration. Through a collision of geometric patterns, Fake envisions his work as “what Queer space can look like,” and that the “queerness is in the nitty-gritty construction.”

July 22, 2020

Through elements of architecture and design, California artist Edie Fake produces colorful and intimately-scaled paintings which metaphorically refer to bodies that exist outside the male/female binary. Purchased with funds from the Keith Shaver Trust, both The Keep (2018), and Partial Donor (2018), exemplify this, and were recently included in the artist's 2018 solo exhibition held at Western Exhibitions, Chicago. These are the first works by the artist to enter the collections.

Source: News, Jan, Feb, Mar 2019