Kenny Rivero “I Can Love You Better”
Shin Gallery
This event has ended.
Shin Gallery opens its winter season with I Can Love You Better, the first New York solo show for Kenny Rivero. The exhibition is comprised of recent paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and a site specific installation.
Rivero keeps a collection of paint chips taken from his childhood home. Broken free of their substrate, these chips reveal the overlap of distinct lives contained within a single domestic space. Rivero is compelled to find and excavate sunken histories, and then reconstruct an imagined, coherent narrative for those hidden, subtly suggested experiences.
Although Rivero’s work often begins with explorations of color, texture, and with mark making, the artist says he assembles these stories not through formal mechanics alone, rather the materials themselves—such as the sweep piles, house paint, and salvaged paper he often utilizes—possess complex identities and specific historical auras. However, personal history is muddled, mingled with other histories: a small vignette about a character’s tortuous loyalty to the Yankees is entangled with a larger narrative of identification with heroic cultural icons.
Rivero excavates, but he also builds. Most often there is a specific narrative within each work, a story layered with affiliations, loyalties, psycho-social histories, and personal as well as shared iconography. I Can Love You Better offers moments of intense accumulation both in content and in materiality.
Media
Schedule
from December 12, 2014 to February 28, 2015
Opening Reception on 2014-12-12 from 18:00 to 21:00