Kris Kuksi Exhibition
Joshua Liner Gallery
This event has ended.
Constructed from pop-culture effluvia—such as model kits, injection-molded toy soldiers and animals, plastic skulls, knick-knack figurines, and mechanical parts—these intricate assemblages combine mass-produced “junk” into rococo tableaux. At once grand and grotesque, these friezelike works register from a distance as architectural ornamentation from the Belle Époque. Up close, the agglomerations of macabre parts take on a Bosch-style chaos, with skulls, skeletons, and other gnarled forms compressed into a dark tangle.
The visual tension between ornate beauty and horrific excess has broad resonance for Kuksi, who strives to merge a nostalgia for “old world” aesthetics and a distaste for contemporary culture into his art. Greek gods mingle with monsters amid a miniature landscape of scaffolding, train tracks, refineries, and plumbing, all resembling decorative bric-a-brac in their combined, tiny form.
This strategy of combination and baroque display is the gesture that transforms the artist’s assemblages into elegant, even lyrical presentations. Among the twelve works on display, the centerpiece of the show is a 6-x-11-foot, wall-mounted sculpture entitled Imminent Utopia. This “Gesamtkunstwerk” depicts a two-sided universe, world and underworld, each balancing the other in a mirrored relationship of sculptural forms, the upper half crowned by a cathedrallike structure. Close in, one sees a plastic landscape populated by classical statuary, wooly mammoths, and construction cranes. It’s a universe of the mind, the existential toolbox from which civilizations both rise and collapse.
Media
Schedule
from November 22, 2008 to December 20, 2008