Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to announce the New York solo debut of Los Angeles artist Kevin Appel. The exhibition will include six new large-scale paintings in his signature architectural style. Appel was the 1999 recipient of the Citibank Private Bank Emerging Artist Award, and his work was recently included in 01.01.01: Art in Technological Times at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Following is an excerpt from the accompanying catalogue:
“The works of Kevin Appel occupy places within and between the practices of painting, architecture, and design…Appel uses the computer to aid in the design of the spaces and reclaims them, as he has said, through the more practical and clearly more labor-intensive process of painting. Yet within a pictorial structure based on a disorienting two-point perspective and a repetition or even replication of forms, the paintings veer from physical reality to virtual reality, at once excluding and enveloping the viewer.
Appel is presently collaborating with Open Office of Architecture in New York on a project called Houses x Artists, for which twelve artists are designing dwellings that could in fact be built and occupied. The very beautiful designs Appel has made for his house thus far feature a series of pavilions made with structural glass of varying colors and opacities. Though relentlessly precise in its design, the house displays a near-total blurring of infrastructure and superstructure. The spaces or rooms that define the house, its patterns of circulation and its relationship to the outdoors are defined by choice, rather than by convenience, and are thus subject to change, representing a move away from modernist notions of control toward contemporary notions of possibility.”
-Janet Bishop
010101: Art in Technological Times, 2001
For this exhibition Appel overlaid a precise plan for his Forest House on to the floor plan for Marianne Boesky Gallery to ascertain the directional views for New Paintings. The house itself, flattened and simplified into rectangular planes, flows fluidly into the stylized woods beyond. The subtly shifting cool-hued palette further reinforces the fluidity between interior and exterior in Appel’s spaces.