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O<\/span>ne morning in Denver as artist John Knuth was getting his exhibition ready at the David B Smith Gallery, the police knocked on the door to check he wasn\u2019t housing a dead body. \u201cThey said, \u2018We\u2019ve got a report of a lot of flies in here. Is there a dead body or anything rotting?\u2019\u201d Knuth recalls to the Guardian over Zoom.<\/p>\n The hundreds of flies emerging from Knuth\u2019s gallery were actually his collaborators. For over a decade, Knuth has been creating paintings using the regurgitation of tens of thousands of flies. \u201cWhen flies eat they digest externally,\u201d explains Knuth. \u201cThey\u2019re in a constant state of regurgitation. They land on a surface, puke up, suck it back in. Puke up, suck it back in.\u201d After feeding the insects a mixture of acrylic colored paint and sugar water, the flies spend several weeks expelling the mixtures on to his canvases. \u201cFrom that I get these really transcendent color connections.\u201d<\/p>\n While that might sound like a rather odd and disgusting approach, Knuth has been praised for pushing the boundaries of nature, beauty and process with his abstract pointillist paintings, which have been described as \u201cvibrant and seemingly luminescent\u201d and \u201cincandescent [and] shimmering\u201d.<\/p>\n As well as being sticky work, it occasionally leads to run-ins with the law. After inviting the investigating Denver police officers inside the gallery, the effortlessly effervescent and excitable Knuth charmingly explained that rather than concealing a corpse, the flies were busy at work. \u201cI told them, \u2018I\u2019m an artist. Hundreds of thousands of flies are making paintings for me. Some are escaping.\u201d The cops quickly echoed the usual response Knuth gets for his work from critics and gallery visitors alike. \u201cThey were so intrigued. They were like, \u2018This is amazing.\u2019 They invited the people at the bank who reported the flies over and 20 minutes later they were all on board with it and apologizing for raising a fuss.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>John Knuth.<\/span> Photograph: Ian Byers-Gamber<\/p>\n Knuth is currently showcasing his latest array of fly paintings at the Hollis Taggart gallery in New York as part of his exhibition, The Hot Garden. This showcase has been particularly resonant for Knuth. It\u2019s his first major exhibition since he lost the Los Angeles home he shared with his wife and child, as well as his entire archive, in January\u2019s Eaton fire. After the tragedy, Knuth returned to fly paintings as \u201cthey helped pay for my house that burned down. I wanted to get back to the beginning point.\u201d<\/p>\n It was almost inevitable that Knuth\u2019s art would intersect with nature. Growing up in the suburbs of Minneapolis and St Paul, Knuth spent all of his time catching snakes, frogs, turtles, and fishing. Knuth\u2019s fascination with animals and insects continued when he became an artist. He would mix rattlesnake venom with paint, he painted coyote penis bones gold, and created gold leaf horseshoe crabs. Even he recognizes that he\u2019s chosen quite an unusual path. \u201cI remember thinking at one point, \u2018What the fuck am I doing? Why didn\u2019t I start painting nudes or get a muse?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n While struggling in high school, Knuth found his salvation in several art books at the library. Intrigued by the work of Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns in particular, Knuth started to regularly visit the variety of art museums across Minneapolis. \u201cThere\u2019s a tremendous art community there that fed my curiosity. That\u2019s really where I discovered art.\u201d Knuth then attended the University Of Minnesota, where he got a BFA in art, and worked under Mark Dion \u2013 a conceptual artist renowned for mixing art and science. \u201cHe was my mentor. He showed me you can be really smart and an intellectual troublemaker, plus go out and drink beer and make a living as an international artist.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>John Knuth \u2013 Daybreak.<\/span> Photograph: John Knuth \/ Evan Walsh<\/p>\n Knuth was first struck by the idea to work with flies in the buildup to the 2003 Iraq war. After reading that flies had been responsible for more human suffering than all wars, because of how they have spread numerous diseases, Knuth initially wanted to create an anti-war piece by tying paper airplanes on to house flies to make his \u201cown little biological warfare air force\u201d. As he explored this option, he noticed that flyspeck looked like little spots of paint.<\/p>\n In 2005, Knuth continued his experimentation by feeding flies McDonald\u2019s and Taco Bell. But the results were just brown paintings. \u201cThey were cool conceptual objects. But not beautiful artworks.\u201d He also didn\u2019t have enough money to buy the number of flies he required to fulfill his vision. Then in 2013, Knuth was approached by the Museum Of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to do a \u201cbig production\u201d of his fly paintings. The resulting video went viral. \u201cThat moment made my career. Since then I\u2019ve had shows around the world.\u201d Knuth\u2019s fly paintings have been bought by multiple private art collectors and are also in the permanent collection at the Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina.<\/p>\n The Hollis Taggart show marks Knuth\u2019s third solo exhibition in New York. After being approached by director Paul Efstathiou in February, Knuth devised the concept of the Hot Garden because he wanted to reflect what he and numerous artists had gone through with the Los Angeles fires. \u201cThis was a generation changing event for my generation of artists. I literally know hundreds of artists that got hit by this. Five artists on my block alone lost their houses.\u201d Since his work had always engaged with climate, bugs and life, it felt like a natural continuation to bring the fire into his paintings. For the titular piece of the exhibition, Knuth wanted to create \u201cdistorted or distressed landscapes by pulling paint across the canvas to make fire motifs\u201d. For the piece January 7, the day that Knuth watched his home burn down, he mixed red, lavender and green flyspeck to produce a \u201cdark and ominous\u201d tone and visuals reminiscent of fire and smoke. While constructing his paintings, Knuth looked at Monet\u2019s use of color compositions in his lily paintings, while turning to warm colors, like oranges and yellows, because they represented heat.<\/p>\n Knuth isn\u2019t just presenting his fly paintings at The Hot Garden. He\u2019s also exhibiting a sculptural installation, entitled The Sculpture Garden. It includes fragments of artworks recovered from his destroyed home, as well as pieces from other artists affected by the fire. Glenn Phillips, the director of the Getty Research Center, was so impressed that he\u2019s already bought two pieces for the Getty Museum. Including, This Is Our Pompeii, a New York Times article on the impact of the LA fires on local artists, covered in red flyspeck.<\/p>\n <\/span>John Knuth \u2013 Untitled.<\/span> Photograph: John Knuth \/ Evan Walsh<\/p>\n While Knuth is delighted that the fly paintings have connected with art lovers and critics yet again, he can\u2019t help but get a little somber when asked if the exhibition has helped him process his trauma. \u201cBeing busy helps. Having a reason to keep doing this helps. But all of my archive and retrospective is gone. That\u2019s the first 25 years of my career. My work was a way to engage in the world. Unfortunately the world engaged with me pretty intensely six months ago. There\u2019s just so much tragedy in the world that the news cycle moves on.\u201d<\/p>\n But as Knuth picks up the pieces for the next phase of his career, he\u2019s not straying too far away from the formula that has garnered him so much success. His new Pasadena studio is full of dead flies caught in fly traps hanging from the globe, giant fishhook sculptures, dead stuffed rattlesnakes painted red, and hundreds of black sea urchins in gold foil painted black. \u201cI\u2019m 46 now, so hopefully I have another 25 years left to make up for what I lost.\u201d<\/p>\n