NYAB Event - Kyle Staver Exhibition

Kyle Staver Exhibition

Lohin Geduld Gallery

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Catalog available Lohin Geduld Gallery is proud to present our third exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Kyle Staver. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with essay by independent curator and critic, Karen Wilkin.

In this series of recent paintings Kyle Staver continues her exploration of intimate scenes while incorporating pensive hues and darker themes. Throughout her career Staver has portrayed the joys of the ordinary world of afternoon bike rides, morning cups of coffee and dressing for the day. Her new paintings depict figure skaters flying through the air and Canada geese soaring overhead. These scenes, with their muted palette and monumental compositions, evoke masters such as Gustave Courbet. In the exhibition catalog, Karen Wilkin writes, “The moments Staver presents to us seem pleasant but without particular significance, non-events that we might not pay attention to, in actuality, here prolonged for scrutiny and delectation by virtue of the painter’s robust gestures and forthright simplifications.”

A number of paintings in this body of new work, however, depart from this domestic arena to delve into allegorical realms of spatial and emotional complexity. In one painting, a voluptuous woman on horseback gazes unashamed out at the viewer, while in another two men are completely engrossed in an almost savage hunt for snapping turtles. As described in the catalog, “Here, unlike the paintings of domesticity, it seems clear that something not only specific but probably significant is happening. But what is it? In contrast to the sense of unremarkable contentment in Staver’s domestic pictures, there’s an elusive suggestion of the disquieting, a suggestion intensified by unstable space, more tipped and layered than in many of Staver’s previous works.” This sense of the preternatural and the uncanny defines this new body of Kyle Staver’s paintings and prints.