“I feel like I’ve hit a stride with this series,” says Ed Templeton from his home in southern California’s Huntington Beach. The artist and skateboarding hall-of-famer has resided in this surf-haven for some 40 years, during which its endless tract housing and sun-baked sidewalks have inspired his skating exploits as much as his art. For his latest exhibition at LA’s Roberts Projects, Templeton has produced a new body of painting and photography that he feels surpasses anything he’s made previously; a level change he attributes to the unbroken period of focus afforded by lockdown. While the paintings have reached new heights, the source material remains familiar, with Templeton mining the same inexhaustible weirdness and unique suburban psychology of Huntington Beach that he first brought to international attention with his breakout 1994 photo series, Teen Smokers.  

By Christopher Knight

At Roberts Projects, the straightforward yet eccentric glimpses of suburban street life in Ed Templeton’s closely observed paintings, drawings and photographs are like scenes witnessed while driving around alone.

A painting of a man seated benignly on a bus bench becomes inexplicably ominous as we watch him watch two young women ride by on a bicycle. A new collage of decade-old photographs of “Zealots With Crosses, Huntington Beach, 2012,” radiates an end-times vibe, its black-and-white juxtaposition of pleasure-seeking beach bathers and evangelical religious fanatics artfully torn in two.

“Part of what I’m exploring in my work is that all these punk kids were the product of parents who were part of the ‘white flight’ out of LA during the 1950s and 60s,” Templeton says of the mass exodus of middle-class white families who moved to the suburbs just as the local Black and Mexican populations were on the rise.

“They created this idyllic space outside the city with a four-bedroom house and a white picket fence to have a family,” he says. “But that’s been a breeding ground for people like me, as well as the punk and skateboard scenes. In the 80s, everyone I hung out with, their parents were divorced. We were probably drawn to skateboarding because it was individualistic.

Roberts Projects is pleased to announce The Spring Cycle, an exhibition of new paintings, drawings and photographs by Ed Templeton that are a direct response to the suburban environment he lives in.

The American suburbia and its customs and rituals have been informing Ed's oeuvre for decades. Currently on view at Roberts Projects in Culver City, his latest body of work titled Spring Cycle is a continuation of this exploration, with a novel storytelling approach. Featuring suggestive imagery, unsettling portraits and idyllic landscapes, these paintings present hyperbolic realities that scrutinize the human condition through the lens of urban isolation. Executed in a realistic style that has defined his painting practice, these scenes are at once familiar and enigmatic, creating an unsettling feel. These paintings are juxtaposed with his works on paper and original photographs which provide further insight into them. 

Roberts Projects announced The Spring Cycle, an exhibition of new paintings, drawings, and photographs by Ed Templeton that are a direct response to the suburban environment he lives in. These new works create hyperbolic realities that scrutinize the human condition through the lens of urban isolation. The exhibition runs January 22nd - March 5th, 2022. This is the artist's eighth solo show with the gallery. Templeton’s most concise works to date continue earlier themes cynical of the provincial customs and rituals of his surroundings, notably the ever-polarizing political milieu over the last five years in Orange County where he lives and works. 

Roberts Projects are opening The Spring Cycle, an exhibition of new paintings, drawings, and photographs by Ed Templeton that are a direct response to the suburban environment he lives in. These new works create hyperbolic realities that scrutinize the human condition through the lens of urban isolation. The Spring Cycle marks the artist’s eighth solo show with the gallery.

From now until March 5, 2022, Templeton’s recent paintings, alongside a series of drawings and photographs, will be on display at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles. The exhibition, titled “The Spring Cycle,” unpacks his complex relationship to Orange County, the conservative district in California that he still calls home. “I found punk music and skateboarding which altered my worldview and disappointed my grandfather,” Templeton said. “I was eager to escape this provincial region, but through twists of fate ended up staying here and planting roots among the endless blocks of tract housing.” 

In new paintings, drawings and photographs Templeton creates a direct response to the suburban environment in which he lives. These new works create hyperbolic realities that scrutinize the human condition through the lens of urban isolation.

As a multidisciplinary creative Templeton has proven to us over the years that the saying "a jack of all trades, is a master of none" has its exceptions. For some, he is an iconic skateboarder that left an indisputable mark on skateboarding's evolution as well as changed its structure and unwritten rules with his company, Toy Machine. For others, he is a street photographer who provided us with an insight into the world of skateboarding, punk, misfits, and disaffected youth, developing a sensible eye for the true image of suburban America along the way, especially Southern California. And finally, he is an illustrator and a painter whose studio works have the ability to emphasize and underline the things he is seeing with the naked eye and through the lens.

By Katy Cowan

In an upcoming exhibition of new paintings, drawings, and photographs, Californian artist Ed Templeton gives us a revealing insight into life in Orange County as politics and culture wars continue to divide hearts and minds. Through his works, we see brutal scrutiny of what it means to be human as well as feel isolated in American suburbia today.