Drinking Spree Exhibition

The Drinking Spree exhibition ran at La Fiambrera Art Gallery in Madrid, Spain from September 9^th to November 5^th 2016. This solo show of Josh Agle’s work included six new original paintings, an additional original work from the 2009 The Last Days of Magic exhibition, fifty limited-edition serigraph prints (mainly artist proofs or printers proofs), and an interesting skull.

Original Paintings
This was Shag’s first solo exhibition at the La Fiambrera Art Gallery and was themed around the trope of the cocktail. The six new paintings include stylised cats, plus mid-modern century artwork or in one case a tiki mask. These are impressively strong and bright Shag images contained in a small footprint of eleven by nine inches. The framing is also beautiful and bright, complementing the paintings that they hold.

Shrunken Skull
Acrylic paint on wooden panel (11″x9″)
The shrunken skull is a tiki drink made with demerara rum, god rum, grenadine and lime juice.

Three Dots and a Dash
Acrylic paint on wooden panel (11″x9″)
Three dots and a dash is a classic tiki cocktail created by Donn the Beachcomber. The cocktail was named after the Morse code for Victory, as represented in this drink by the garnish of three cherries and a chunk of pineapple.

Pink Lady
Acrylic paint on wooden panel (11″x9″)
A pink lady is a traditional gin-based cocktail with gin, grenadine (causing the pink color) and egg white (usually giving a white foam head but presumably strained here).

Pousse Café
Acrylic paint on wooden panel (11″x9″)
A pousse-café is a layered or stacked drink in which the cocktail is built using various liqueurs with decreasing densities to create colored layers. Generally created for visual excitement rather than taste, they are typically sipped a layer at a time.

The Painkiller
Acrylic paint on wooden panel (11″x9″)
The painkiller is a rum-based cocktail trademarked by Pusser’s Rum which includes four parts pineapple juice, one part cream of coconut, and one part orange juice; shaken, served on the rocks topped by grated nutmeg.

Violet Royale
Acrylic paint on wooden panel (11″x9″)
The violet royale cocktail is made with six parts champagne to one part Crème de Violette. The drink is floral, sweet and purple.

The Phrenology Student
Acrylic paint on wooden panel (20″x16″)
This picture is not one of the six new original paintings produced by Shag for the Drinking Spree exhibition. Instead it is from the 2009 The Last Days of Magic solo exhibition held at the M Modern Gallery in Palm Springs, California. The painting was placed on its own wall, just through the archway within the gallery.

Skull Lamp
Josh Agle designed a very limited edition skull lamp for the Drinking Spree exhibition. The lamp is handmade in Spain in an edition size of just seven pieces, each signed by the artist. The skull lamp is mains powered with a dimmer switch and can sit on the floor or be hung on the wall.

Serigraph Prints
The Drinking Spree exhibition is listed as including fifty limited-edition serigraph prints, mainy from Shag’s personal collection of very rare artist proofs and printer proofs. Unfortunately the three pictures below only show forty-seven so I am unsure if the extra three existed at all, and if they did then what they were. For a comprehensive list of names for the forty-seven prints, please see the printed list in the bottom right of the third picture – no seriously, we are not pretend science, resolution-increasing CSI – just look through the limited-edition pages on this site and you will find them all.