Kevin Appel
08 Sep - 07 Oct 2006
KEVIN APPEL
8 September - 7 October 2006
Wilkinson Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo show in London of Los Angeles based painter Kevin Appel.
Kevin Appel’s paintings for the past ten years have addressed the relationship between physical space, architecture, and the painted image. Currently, this interest has turned toward representing an illogical relationship between an iconic architectural representation of a home and its natural surroundings. Gravity has given way to a cataclysmic albeit humorous amalgamation of American vernacular architecture and modern structures impaled by caricatured trees and logs. The house form is abstracted and manipulated; multiplied, overlaid and folded into itself to create an uneasy narrative of muscular upheaval. The current paintings follow an approximation of perspectival convention as it pertains to representation, but this effect is not tied to any outlying origin. The causal forms are primal structures--simultaneously recalling a child's drawing of home and the architecture of the American frontier. They are both four-sided pitched roof structures and cobbled together shelters that are themselves still partly "of nature" or “ground”. This sense of the figure being inseparable from the ground exists as a driving premise - an exigent proposal that is not entirely in a pictorial space, but exists as a philosophical position based in experience.
The architecture is caught in a moment of simultaneous becoming and dissolution. The figure ground relationship is insecure. It is subject to the same forces of push and pull that have always defined the pictorial, but now in a way that bears directly upon our sense of being whole or fragmented, secure or vulnerable.
Kevin Appel lives and works in Los Angeles, and has shown extensively including Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California (Solo 1999), Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico (Solo 2001), ‘Painting at the Edge of the World’, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2001), ‘010101: Art in Technological Times’, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2001), ‘DRIVE-BY: New Art from L.A.’, South London Gallery (1999). His work is in many museum collections including Museum of Modern Art, New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
8 September - 7 October 2006
Wilkinson Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo show in London of Los Angeles based painter Kevin Appel.
Kevin Appel’s paintings for the past ten years have addressed the relationship between physical space, architecture, and the painted image. Currently, this interest has turned toward representing an illogical relationship between an iconic architectural representation of a home and its natural surroundings. Gravity has given way to a cataclysmic albeit humorous amalgamation of American vernacular architecture and modern structures impaled by caricatured trees and logs. The house form is abstracted and manipulated; multiplied, overlaid and folded into itself to create an uneasy narrative of muscular upheaval. The current paintings follow an approximation of perspectival convention as it pertains to representation, but this effect is not tied to any outlying origin. The causal forms are primal structures--simultaneously recalling a child's drawing of home and the architecture of the American frontier. They are both four-sided pitched roof structures and cobbled together shelters that are themselves still partly "of nature" or “ground”. This sense of the figure being inseparable from the ground exists as a driving premise - an exigent proposal that is not entirely in a pictorial space, but exists as a philosophical position based in experience.
The architecture is caught in a moment of simultaneous becoming and dissolution. The figure ground relationship is insecure. It is subject to the same forces of push and pull that have always defined the pictorial, but now in a way that bears directly upon our sense of being whole or fragmented, secure or vulnerable.
Kevin Appel lives and works in Los Angeles, and has shown extensively including Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California (Solo 1999), Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico (Solo 2001), ‘Painting at the Edge of the World’, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2001), ‘010101: Art in Technological Times’, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2001), ‘DRIVE-BY: New Art from L.A.’, South London Gallery (1999). His work is in many museum collections including Museum of Modern Art, New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.