NYAB Event - Alex Kanevsky “Beautiful and Profound Painting”

Alex Kanevsky “Beautiful and Profound Painting”

J. Cacciola Gallery

This event has ended.

We are pleased to present Alex Kanevsky’s eighth solo exhibition at J.Cacciola Gallery, titled ‘Beautiful and Profound Paintings’, featuring approximately 18 works in oil, showcasing paintings and an accompanying mindset that is breaking new ground for both the artist and the gallery.

Beautiful and profound — two of the most debated and often misunderstood adjectives in the canon of art — are never words you trumpet without the work to back it up. For Alex Kanevsky, arguably one of the most accomplished of the contemporary painters who walk the line between traditional and contemporary concepts and aesthetics, it’s time to clearly and unapologetically state what he is after. Amid cries from art critics that beauty has no place in the contemporary art world, and the attendant removal of that word from its vernacular and value system, Kanevsky’s current exhibition responds by saying, “Beautiful and profound — these are still important words to me as a 21st-century painter and fundamental to my work.”

In Kanevsky’s current exhibition, those words take on new meaning. The woman lying contorted and supine in Breathing Room, caught in the middle of an explosion of paint, for example, is not a traditionally “beautiful” image. It is an uncomfortable, unconventional, awesome kind of beautiful, one that took much keen observation and imaginative execution on the artist’s part. Paintings such as Dark Pond, Cold River, and Red Room are equally gritty, edgy, and curious. They are beautiful in an unexpected way, one that challenges but does not threaten. By labeling these paintings “beautiful” Kanevsky is in a way redefining the very connotations of the word that has led the contemporary art world to shun it. Regarding “profound,” for Kanvesky that word symbolizes the emotions behind the work of art, the motivation that happens on a deeper level than intellect and that is transmitted and recognized through the visual experience.

Alex Kanevsky was born in Rostov, Russia, in 1963. He attended the Vilnius University, in Lithuania, where he studied mathematics. During that time he also took painting classes at a small evening art school. In 1983 he immigrated to the United States, where he worked as a translator and drew pictures for telephone-book advertisements. Kanevsky later attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), concentrating on painting. The artist currently lives in Philadelphia with his wife Hollis Heichemer and teaches a weekly class at PAFA, spending the majority of this time working in his studio. Kanevsky has shown his work at various galleries, museums, and schools throughout the United States, Canada, Italy, Ireland, and the United Kingdom.