Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Kevin Appel. This will be the second solo show at the gallery for this Los Angeles-based artist.
The exhibition consists of new paintings and collages made over the last two years. Appel is known for paintings that combine the conventions of architectural rendering, modernist design, and interior space planning with masterful painterly devices. His earlier paintings of interior details paid homage to the LA version of International Style. Appel has worked with Open Office, a New York architectural firm that collaborates with artists, on the practical and impractical aspects of building a house. From his work with them, he produced paintings that depict a series of related views from within a fictional semi-transparent house.
In this new body of work, Appel works with the "home" in its basic sense, a four-sided structure with a pitched roof. These works come from and come out of an exhibition the artist had at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, titled "Description Without Place". In this body of work there is a distinct shift away from his earlier work as he takes on the house in its entirety, and portrays it in a more symbolic and iconic way. He depicts logs, wood grain and brickwork, the basic foundations of house building, as stylized elements. These forms allude to the log cabin and salt-box cottage and other forms of American vernacular architecture. Rather than views of three dimensional space and horizons, there is now a more contracted and abstracted space where the house is turned in on itself. There is also a play with scale and proportion, the oversized painted logs are almost cartoon like as they penetrate the house. Overall, the content of the structure depicted is more basic, yet the painterly space is more complicated, distorted and ultimately elusive.
In addition to the recent solo show at the Museo Tamayo, Appel was also included in "Animated Architecture" at the Sunkok Art Museum in Seoul, Korea in 2003 and "Drawings Now: 8 Propositions" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2002.