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Email PagePainting Can You Take Me to Heaven
April 29, 2006- May 27, 2006
Reception: April 29, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Kadar Brock
BUIA Gallery
541 W 23rd StBUIA Gallery is pleased to present Painting Can You Take Me to Heaven, the debut solo exhibition of Brooklyn based artist Kadar Brock. Revolving around an interest in abstract painting and a lifelong association with new age spirituality, Brock’s paintings resurrect the shamanic dreams and potential transcendentalism associated with the Abstract Expressionists. Simultaneously, however, Brock rejects the need for a specific regimented framework, accessing instead the ‘autonomy’ of painting (abstract or non) and allowing for entry into something kinetic and ultra contemporary. In this way, he aligns himself with German painters Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, and Werner Buttner. Electing abstraction as his medium, Brock enters the discourse and renews the power and validity of abstract painting.
“Abstract pictures are fictional models since they illustrate a reality we can neither see nor describe. We identify this reality using negative concepts: the un-known, the in-comprehensible, the in-finite… Through abstract painting we achieve a better possibility of referring to the confused and incomprehensible because the abstract, with its more direct expressiveness—that is, with all the means of art—describes ‘nothing.’” – Gerhard Richter
This “nothing” lends itself to an inherent subjectivity in which the viewer must make an active choice to bring meaning to the work. For Brock this act is much like harboring a spiritual belief - the viewer must have faith to create meaning, and can simultaneously choose to find profundity or emptiness. This paradox becomes the subject matter, while the artist’s yearning for meaning reveals an ultimately optimistic and romantic stance.
In You’ll take me home where the magic’s from (and I’ll be with you), 2006, the artist conflates Abstract Expressionist and Minimalist styles to infuse his paintings with vibrant energy, bold colors, and charged physicality. In the upper right hand corner, a luminous black orb hovers above a large vertical trapezoidal red shape with a vibrant center, winking at sci-fi and futuristic aesthetics. Spray-painted zigzags traverse the middle of the painting and develop a pulsating kinetic energy, referencing crystalline forms in a nod to the esoteric writings of GI Gurdjieff. The application of paint is intensely physical, and the composition becomes an enveloping vortex.
Kadar Brock is a graduate of The Cooper Union. He has shown in New York and abroad- most recently in Junge Abstrakte at Temporary in Dusseldorf, in New York Style curated by David Hunt at Angell Gallery in Toronto, and in the NBC show at BUIA. Press credits include inclusion in Making an Entrance at Any Age by Roberta Smith in the New York Times and a review by Charlie Finch of Artnet.com.
Art Reviews of Painting Can You Take Me to Heaven
| New York Times May 19, 2006 | Roberta Smith | "...Still, while the title implies a tender, even romantic esteem for the medium, the work itself qualifies as tough love, and this is probably a good thing. Mr. Brock slams together contrasting techniques and abstract styles, ending up with a kind of sci-fi Ab-Ex, Post-Graffiti mongrel vocabulary with undeniable verve. Deep space, shaded colors and smooth surfaces are pitted against brusquely textured geometric forms and scaffoldings suggesting electrical towers seen from steep angles, in bright if not fluorescent tones and scattered downpours, heavy at times, of black and white drips...." |
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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