For four decades, Jason Fox has been producing figurative paintings that, through the will of the artist’s imagination, transcend the novelty of their pop-y subject matter into a more capacious art historical timeline. In Fox’s paintings, the visages of Barack Obama and Bob Marley merge in a cubist scramble; an archangel-like figure crosses into a strip mall while staring at an iPhone; and a scantily clad man in a trenchcoat and a Jason’s hockey mask disrupts what would otherwise be a lovely day at the park. 

The latter is taken from a new suite of work that Fox has made for his presentation with David Kordansky at the upcoming edition of Independent. Fox didn’t make this group of paintings with a singular narrative in mind, he tells me in an interview at his studio and home in Poughkeepsie, a former firehouse that he shares with his wife—the artist Huma Bhabha—and three rowdy dogs. But one takes shape regardless: it is a party in the park with a few uninvited guests, an American landscape study that alludes to, though not with a heavy hand, the chaotic psychic energy that underpins the country’s current mood. “They all have a kind of blue sky, green, gray sort of palette that just happened by accident [...] it feels like you're in this insane picnic,” he says of the work. “[I’m] trying to be a little more upbeat but there's obviously a kind of dark side to what's going on.” Fox points to the hockey mask painting: “This white guy entitlement thing is just so real, it's such an American thing, too,” he says. “You have a lot of these people who are just so fucking angry because they have this expectation about their lives and the fact that reality is not matching up with it.”

Speaking of his wider influences, Fox namechecks Philip Guston, Pablo Picasso, and Georg Baselitz as just a few of his major reference points. The imprint of those masters can be seen throughout his larger body of work, which has recently included exhibitions at David Kordansky in Los Angeles and Antiheroes (2025-26), the artist’s first solo exhibition in China, which took place at Cc Foundation in Shanghai. Between 1991 and 2005, Fox exhibited at the legendary New York gallery Feature Inc., run by the dealer Hudson until his death in 2014. The characters that Fox built and reconfigured in this time still inform how he makes work, his coming Independent exhibition being no exception. Fox’s masked man dates back to the early 1990s. “Sometimes I'll go back and I'll look at something I did like 30 years ago. I'm like, Oh I forgot about that,” Fox says. “Maybe I should do that guy [again].”