Ken Tisa “The Color Of Sound”

Kate Werble Gallery

[Image: Ken Tisa "Burning in the Flames of Love" (2017)]

This event has ended.

Ken Tisa’s The Color of Sound debuts a group of 10 new paintings made over the last 3 years. While Tisa has been the subject of several recent solo exhibitions - including Objects/Time/Offerings at Gordon Robichaux this year and Paintings, Ceramics at Kate Werble in 2013 - these previous showings have largely focused on the artist’s works of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. The Color of Sound seeks to retrain focus on Tisa’s ongoing artistic practice, highlighting his prowess as a painter of over five decades.

The paintings in the exhibition feature biomorphic, psychedelic forms that bring to mind both the outer cosmos and the internal recesses of the human body. A lover of multiscalar duality, Tisa works in delicate materials such as gouache and watercolor but in large-scale, placing paint and surface in generative tension. The resulting paintings retain the immediacy and intimacy of their medium while being stretched to the limits of their workability.

In this new work, Tisa makes painting with watercolors a durational and meditative act, allowing the self its abundant, and at times contradictory, histories and revelations. This is an important exhibition for Tisa as it represents the first time his paintings have been shown together in over two decades.

Ken Tisa (USA, b. 1945 in Philadelphia, PA) received his BFA from Pratt Institute and his MFA from Yale School of Art and Architecture. Tisa has held solo exhibitions at Gordon Robicheaux, (2017) New York, NY; Kate Werble Gallery, New York, NY (2013); Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD (2006); Centre d’Art et de Culture, Aix-en-Provence, FR (2004); Stellweg-Seguy Gallery, New York, NY (1988); Alexander Wood Gallery, New York, NY (1986); and Fischbach Gallery, New York, NY (1972). His work has been exhibited at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; Artist’s Space, New York, NY; and Art in General, New York, NY. He currently lives and works in New York, NY, and is a professor in the painting department at Maryland Institute College of Art.