Kes Zapkus Exhibition

Silas Von Morisse

This event has ended.

Silas Von Morisse Gallery present Kes Zapkus’ new paintings as he approaches his 80th year.

KES ZAPKUS: NEW PAINTINGS is summary work, which substantiates a life long investigation of deeply held beliefs concerning the essence of the historical Art of Painting. Relegating image making and illustration to photography he focuses his concentration to celebrate the other aspects of a full visual language. His work is defiantly non-pictorial but fugue-like in structure with a complex of elements and small units cross-referenced and viewed simultaneously for the sense of totality. Zapkus’ painting is a content generated abstraction (as the titles identify); and each work is keyed to a specific expressive probability. Its orientation philosophically is “maximalist” where entirety is correlative to reality and truth. Conceptually it seeks symphonic equivalence or parallels to musical composition, relying on paint passages, color allusions, directional, linear, spatial, and rhythmic pulsation for its structure. The three large paintings in the exhibit appear as a revisitation of ideals from his painting life.

Kes Zapkus, born in Lithuania in 1938 (as a U.S. citizen), grew up in Torrington, Connecticut. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, BFA 1960 and Syracuse University, MFA 1962, lived in Paris 1962-1965 and in New York City since 1965. He has exhibited extensively internationally and his work is in prestigious collections in the USA and abroad notably: The Brooklyn Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, Joseph Hirshhorn Museum, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beunignen, Rotterdam, Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville , M.I.T., Cambridge, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Morgan Library and Museum, NYC ; significant exhibitions include: Gres Gallery, Chicago 1962, “Six Americans”, Paris 1964, Stable Gallery 1968, Paula Cooper 1971-79, John Weber 1979-89, and retrospectives at Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh 1981 and National Gallery of Art, Vilnius, Lithuania 2014. A comprehensive bilingual monograph Kestutis Zapkus was published in 2014.