Thomas Kovachevich “2013”
Callicoon Fine Art
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Callicoon Fine Arts presents an exhibition by Thomas Kovachevich that will inaugurate its new gallery space at 49 Delancey Street, around the corner from the gallery’s current location at 124 Forsyth Street. The exhibition will occupy both spaces. The gallery is pleased to be collaborating with Show Room Gowanus, where an installation by Kovachevich. This is Kovachevich’s second exhibition with both galleries.
Collectively titled “2013” these exhibitions across three spaces foreground one year of production by Kovachevich. While functioning as a framework for the artist’s daily practice, the span of time also underscores the importance of duration, often marked in the work by barely perceptible movement or seemingly unexplained phenomena.
At first it was the ordinary materials that surrounded him when working as a physician - tissues, gauzes - that inspired the making of objects. These objects embodied the intimacy of touch and intuitiveness of thought that also informed his working philosophy as a doctor. For example, one early work involves the careful application of a wide strip of plastic tape to hold together two pieces of tissue paper. The sensibility behind this transformative act of joining extends to Kovachevich’s use of painting, drawing, and for ms of sculptural assembly that result in large, space filling volumetric forms. In one group of works corrugated plastic is cut to form wedge shaped constructions, columns, and giant ovular wheels. The semi transparent shapes in three dimensions gain volume by holding light within them, their shape determined by a scoring gesture analogous to drawing.
Compressions of time and process are evident in the artist’s series of foot-square canvases, mostly on black grounds. A triptych of large paintings on fiberglass panels, each edged with duct tape, magnify their effect. These works began as references to, or portraits of, painted plastic vacuum-form packaging and have developed into depictions of what could be called “things” but that elude categorization. Perhaps some explanation will come in the future, as when scientists recently discovered that movement of a fibrous material can be triggered by exposing it to moisture and harvested for energy - a phenomenon patented by Kovachevich years earlier and that has formed the basis of his work in performance and installation since he first began his practice as an artist in the late 1960s.
Thomas Kovachevich was born in Detroit, MI and lives and works in New York. He has had one-person exhibitions at The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Hotel Wolfers - the Herman Daled residence, Brussels, The Albert and Vera List Center at MIT, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Santa Monica Museum of Art; at galleries such as Farideh Cadot and Berggruen & Cie, both Paris, Francesca Pia, Bern, and Curt Marcus, NY. Significant group exhibitions include Documenta 5, exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, NY and The Detroit Institute of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, COCO Kunstverein, Vienna, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. In May Kovachevich will have an exhibition at Galerie de France, Paris.
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Schedule
from February 23, 2014 to March 30, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-02-23 from 18:00 to 20:00