NYAB Event - Kurt Knobelsdorf "Postcard From Florida"

Kurt Knobelsdorf "Postcard From Florida"

steven harvey fine art projects

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Shfap projects presents Postcard from Florida, a second solo exhibition by 31 year-old, Miami-based artist Kurt Knobelsdorf featuring 23 small intensely worked paintings composed of strange painterly snapshots of America.

Knobelsdorf’s paintings blend a quirky and highly personal figurative and landscape imagery with a sophisticated painterly surface and drawing related to painters as diverse as Peter Doig and Albert York.

Knobelsdorf’s imagry seems to come from the back roads of America, like a painterly equivalent to photographs by Jacob Holt or Robert Frank. In Knobelsdorf’s work mysterious rituals occur in the midst of daily life. Knobelsdorf’s panels themselves can appear like found objects, old paintings marked and abraded.

Working from his own photographs as well as found images, Knobelsdorf’s paintings bears a complex relationship to photography. In Homestead, a dancing alligator appears to have been taken from a Florida postcard but is actually of a sculpture of an alligator that the artist painted from life.

Filmmaker Chris Wilcha wrote “The myth persists that photographs have the power to steal our souls but Knobelsdorf's paintings have the opposite, restorative effect. While the amateur snapshots he uses clinically archive what a family member or lover looked like at a particular moment in time, Knobelsdorf's paintings imbue his anonymous photographic source material with the feeling of deeply lived experience.”

About the artist

Born in Grosse Point, Michigan, Kurt Knobelsdorf grew up on the Gulf Coast of Florida. He studied first at the Dunedin Fine Art Center and later graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2004. A Charles X. Carlson residency grant, among the many awards garnered at PAFA, brought Knobelsdorf into contact and an ensuing friendship with the grant’s sponsor EM Saniga, the Lancaster County painter and scientist whose work was last shown by steven harvey fine art projects in October of 2010. Knobelsdorf showed his work last November at Coleman Bancroft LLC in New York City and in July at Gallery B in Sag Harbor, NY.