NYAB Event - Kyle Staver “Tall Tales”

Kyle Staver “Tall Tales”

steven harvey fine art projects

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Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects presents a solo exhibition of recent paintings by Kyle Staver. This is the artist’s first one-person exhibit at SHFAP. It will take place in the gallery’s two locations, 208 Forsyth Street and 237 Eldridge Street. The exhibition is accompanied by a color catalog with an essay by Alexi Worth.

Staver makes large-scale figurative paintings and small sculptural reliefs. Her subjects include domestic interiors, rural scenes from her Minnesotan childhood, and most recently, mythological characters in a range of predicaments. Staver’s paintings of Pandora, Ganymede and Icarus posess a startling freshness that pulls them straight into the present. These mythic bodies are intimate and relatable. As the artist puts it: “I am taking the universal and telling you about my stake in it…. The narratives are as timely now as they were 600 years ago.”

Staver has a significant presence on Facebook; since 2010 she has been posting a daily triptych of thematically related art historical images, that regularly attracts hundreds of “likes”. In her own work, Staver is inspired by and in conversation with artists such as Renoir, Titian and Picasso. Her bold and quirky treatment of the figure engages contemporaries like Carroll Dunham, Nicole Eisenman and Angela Dufresne as well.

Staver’s sweeping gestures and interlocking patterns activate every inch of the canvas and strategically guide the viewer across its surface. Staver situates her flat figures within a deep space, creating a feeling of suspended tension and mystery. The recipe is simple and potent.

There is something darkly comic about the humanity in these paintings. As John Yau puts it, “Staver’s genius is her ability to envision a mythological world from a child’s point of view, which is to say the vision of someone who believes that these figures exist as flesh, fur, feathers and blood, rather than as symbols or allegorical representations.”

Staver received her MFA from the Yale School of Art. She has exhibited her work across the United States, and is a recent recipient of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize. She was recently elected a member of the National Academy.