Richard Kalina Exhibition
Lennon, Weinberg, Inc.
This event has ended.
The New Yorker said of him, “A painter’s painter, Kalina has affinities with other New York artists who came of age in the sixties and seventies, from Jennifer Bartlett to Philip Taaffe.” The magazine referred to Luquillo, a resincoated crumpled striped canvas from 1970 as “post-painterly abstraction,” and said of A Cartesian Diver, 2009, “the buoyant hexagons traverse a grid, the intersections of which are cut into squares of raw canvas, giving the delicate composition a satisfyingly rough contrast.” It called the recent paintings “elegantly tessellated collages, his strongest work yet.” Along with A Cartesian Diver, the current exhibition includes seven
additional paintings and a group of new watercolors, all inspired by the representation of scientific phenomena — astronomy, chemistry, physics, and cybernetics. In the last decade Kalina has refined a unique method of making these paintings. He begins with a small sketch, and then draws the composition to scale on vellum placed over the surface of a panel. This “cartoon” becomes the guide for the next steps: masking the edges and areas intended to remain exposed, laying down a white ground layer, and adhering hundreds of cut and torn pieces of painted paper onto the linen. Painting sheets of rice paper using only transparent pigments, Kalina rips and cuts small pieces of paper and overlaps or abuts them to form an array of ovals, rings, circles, bands and hexagons. The shapes are distributed across fields of irregular, interleaved polygons in variegated tones of close colors that establish a shallow planar space.
Media
Schedule
from January 19, 2012 to February 25, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-01-19 from 18:00 to 20:00