NYAB Event - KK Kozik "New Paintings"

KK Kozik "New Paintings"

Storefront Ten Eyck

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The paintings of KK Kozik are strange, yet familiar. Through uncanny juxtapositions and tightly-constructed scenarios, the artist reconfigures everyday surroundings into dream-like tableaux that lead us to question our memories, myths, and identities. The works depict interiors replete with the trappings of sophisticated urban life and landscapes that recall care-free youth. With an omnibus reach, the artist references popular and folk culture, literature, fairy tales, and the history of art in a high-wire juggling act that mixes the prosaic with the sublime. In Kozik's paintings, elements are rearranged to create a surprising new world where the exotic and the everyday appear side by side in a manner that recalls surrealism but whose unique voice is ultimately sui generis.

Technically masterful, beautifully painted and composed, the paintings entertain, delight, and amuse while retaining a powerful mystery. The work is knowing and smart, inviting us to examine its secrets while giving nothing away. Like the image she repeats in her work of the hand that holds a cigarette from behind a curtained window, KK Kozik's work beckons us to explore a world unseen. As viewers we are participants in a narrative whose explanation is just out of reach.

The artist writes of her work and process: "What differentiates this new body of work from past work is that my sources of inspiration and way of working have changed. While my paintings are regularly impelled by a subconscious urgency whose meaning is often initially opaque, this work has stepped out of the shadows and now explicitly addresses my experiences, surroundings, and worldview with the hope that it will ring true to others. My new stated goal of making mesmerizing paintings is parallel to the Caspar David Friedrich motif of the mesmerized figure. It's a Chinese box effect as I have become more mesmerized myself. I am more involved in looking at and reacting to the painting than in realizing what is in my mind's eye."

KK Kozik divides her time between Brooklyn, NY, and Sharon, Connecticut. She has exhibited extensively in New York, most recently at Black & White Gallery in Chelsea. Her work has been featured in numerous solo and group shows throughout the United States and abroad, notably in "Open House" at the Brooklyn Museum. She recently collaborated with poet and critic Barry Schwabsky on a series of four-color etchings published by VanDeb Editions, one of which was the recipient of the Magnesium Elecktron Prize at the 2009 North American Print Biennial. Kozik recently completed a large public art commission for New York's MTA Arts for Transit, two large stained glass windows for the Rockaway Park/Beach 116th Street subway station. Residencies and fellowship awards include the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, a BCAT Multimedia Fellowship, an Artist Fellowship at Weir Farm in Connecticut, and an artist residency at Hofstra University. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Artnews, Time Out New York, the New Yorker, and Artnet.