NYAB Event - Richard Kalina "A Survey 1970-2010"

Richard Kalina "A Survey 1970-2010"

Lennon, Weinberg, Inc.

This event has ended.

This exhibition surveys forty years of Richard Kalina’s work. We have wanted to organize a show like this ever since we first started working with Richard nearly twenty years ago. When we included the striking tondo, Mnemonic Device, in a summer group show in 1992, Richard gave us a slide show that revealed the often surprising, always fascinating developments that had brought his work to that point. Our seven exhibitions of his work since then have only added to our desire to present this show.

Kalina pursues what he describes as “an investigation into a grammar of abstraction that takes into account formal strategies, wide-ranging references, and the set of ideas that have swirled around modernist painting and the art that followed it.” His approach allows for improvisation and contradiction within the mutable systems that define the many distinct cycles of his work. Elements are shared across his work – color, the grid, references to representation, decoration and art history, along with aspects of humor and play. They are combined or omitted as required by the project at hand. “The paintings’ parts are loosely tied town and ready to rearrange themselves whenever they are called upon to do so.”

The evolution of his materials and methods from straight painting to an elaborate, layered collage technique has generated its own significant impact. “I like doing things in an organized and methodical way,” Kalina says, “It allows me to move ahead confidently with no real idea of where I am going.” The exhibition’s eighteen selected works make evident the accomplishments of his open-ended inquiry in which every answer raises a new question.