Kevin Appel

KEVIN APPEL

KEVIN APPEL

MILES M c E N E RY G A L L E RY

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com

GAMY STRATA: Martin Basher on the Paintings of Kevin Appel

As the sun rises over fragrant jacaranda and palm, good Angelenos sort their trash. Paper goes in one bag, plastics and metal in a second, food scraps in a third. These leavings are rolled curbside in huge colored bins, where they get a light misting from the lawn sprinklers, a hot squirt from the neighbor’s yappy poodle, before being hauled off by big men in big trucks. Yogurt containers, packing peanuts, and old tax papers enter the city’s river of refuse in a raucous tumble, some destined to find second, virtuous, recycled lives, the rest headed to final internment. In Kevin Appel’s studio however, the refuse accumulates.

Scrambled and arranged, photographed and reprinted, splattered and brushed, Appel’s studio scraps find a second life not as re-formed paper pulp or newly molded milk bottles, but as grist in his painting mill.

This is, of course, a wobbly metaphor. Appel is a precise painter, not a practitioner of junk sculpture or assemblage, and his studio has no shriveling mandarin peels among the long racks of paints, brushes and pigments. There are no bags of old soda bottles in the office, no flattened Amazon boxes by the roller doors, and no rusting bike frames in the outside prep workshop. But, the point is this: Appel applies the frugal economies of disposal and recycling to his painting.

He bundles and crushes form; abstracts the legible; rescues image and idea; and scrapes, piles, and layers with the same gusto and lack of sentimentality we afford our domestic discards. If we think of trash day as a domestic catharsis, of recycling as an act of love and respect for our world, Appel’s painterly process echoes these notions. His is a practice that purges without qualm, saves only what is necessary, and draws from the leavings of his rich, multi-decade output to generate risky, uncompromising, deeply generous images.

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Roughly, Appel’s practice is a two-part affair. It begins with collaged assemblies of studio refuse. Some of this refuse is photographic—images of architecture and rock, longstanding motifs for Appel, whose multi-decade career has always engaged the structures and landscapes of Southern California (often Los Angeles). There are also pictures of fruit, bread, Greek antiquities, and grainy black-and-white photos of the occasional body part that could be either turnof-the-19th-century smut or reproductions of classical sculpture. These photos, frequently sliced and cut, are jumbled and layered among masking detritus from earlier paintings, laid so they pile and loop, twisting to show their blank-paper rears, overlapping to both reveal and obscure more images beneath. As the cutouts and cutoffs build, it is shape and curlicue-edge that come to define composition. Yet, there’s tension between the legible and the illegible. The photographic content is rendered more as a part of an overall form than as a series of discreet images, but these collages convey an archaeology, an engagement with spaces past and present, an abiding interest in the surfaces of the earth and our tenuous marks upon it. It’s a provisional proposition, coming as suggestive whispers rather than hard statements.

Trenchantly analogue in construction, the assemblages could themselves be stand-alone works. But Appel photographs the compositions under bright lights, capturing shadows and the occasional reflections of packing tape and gloss photo paper, before printing the resulting images in ultraviolet inks onto large, exquisitely pristine polished-gesso panels. Image becomes substrate for a second step—the rendering of primary material, and a transformation from photo to paint. Things then get risky. Appel paints directly onto the prints, applying pigment in a series of high-stake retorts to the printed image beneath.

Forms from the photos, in particular the voided arcs and circles of the paper cutouts and of the folded paper, become repeated riffing shapes now laid down in flat layers of thick-daubed oil; brushy acrylic; and slim, grainy layers

of screen-print ink. Whole blocks of canvas are masked off and covered over entirely, while other areas are covered but thinly opaque. A master of the incidental, the varied surfaces Appel applies range from gelid, almost mechanically applied porcelains of scraped titanium-white, to tactile smeared gobs and drips. They occlude the image beneath, each layer stacked and piled, much like each piece of paper in the collages. But unlike collaged paper, pigments are permanent, and Appel walks a taut line—each new layer stomps, smothers and dances over those laid down before.

At this point, any safe painter would likely come at Appel’s work and apply dozens of careful layers, incrementally pushing and pulling the composition into resolve. But Appel eschews the circumspective path for that of the trash man slinging bundles at the crusher. His process is one of big moves: bulldozer painting that sees compositions blotted out and plowed over with bravura and peril. It’s an exhilarating slash-and-burn strategy that abides little indecision and no half commitment. Failure feels imminent; each move seems to be a flirtation with disaster. Yet Appel holds the line. His compositions come within a hair’s breadth of the abyss, but he manages—just barely—to pull back from the edge. The paint hits uneasy notes of rhythm and pace that punch back and forth between obstinate photographic legibility and straight abstraction, between flatness and depth, between measured pattern and searing white noise.

The works teeter, their instability a constant threat, their compositions finding resolution in contingency.

Reviewing Appel in The Los Angeles Times a few years back, David Pagel wrote that Appel’s paintings were at war with themselves. “While that may be hell for the artist,” he commented, “it’s great for viewers.” 1 There’s no question about that. And yet, one has to suspect that Appel may also relish 1. David Pagel, “Kevin Appel’s ‘Paintings’ Pack Punch at Susanne Vielmetter,” The Los Angeles Times, 26 July 2012.

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the battle; there’s a sense of glee in all this work, a contrarian streak. He appears to enjoy the push and pull; the editing; the blunt, unambiguous pleasure of a sweeping erasure.

This brings me back, once again, to the trash and recycling metaphor, to the freedom that comes when one clears the house in order to reinvent and renew.

Clinging to the old is not Appel’s style; indeed, the man is brutally unsentimental about stuff. Just as his studio is clean, so too is his garage. There’s a car in it, but no junk. The kids’ old wading pool hit the curb years ago, right next to the busted Exercycle. This Marie Kondo-esqe approach to things, with Appel tossing out the redundant and the used up, is precisely what informs the formal choices in his paintings. He doesn’t brook the unnecessary.

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Appel’s lack of sentimentality also extends to the broader ideas surrounding his work. His hardheaded approach to form also applies to the conceptual, insofar as he has a willingness to shift and reinvent, to vigorously interrogate his own suppositions and to pivot freely. There’s a maxim that a good artist should be his or her own toughest critic, and Appel’s self-appraisals are cleareyed and unaccommodating. If necessary, he’ll purge his idols and relics, kicking them to the curb.

Yet if flux is something of a leitmotif, it also points to an enduring theme that has sustained Appel’s work for decades: a notion of dissolution, of form breaking down, of structure going flaky at the welds. Whether artificial or natural, the work always seems to suggest, things fall apart. Indeed, Appel has long talked about his painting dealing with collapse and decay, both in terms of his entropic subject matter and in the way he deals with composition. And it might be this notion of the painted ruin that ties all his work together. Structure reverts to un-form.

Appel emerged to acclaim in the 1990s with paintings of eerie, empty modern California interiors, paintings that sat just on the representational side of abstraction. The forms in the paintings held to a tight grid and perspective, but the corner connectors seemed to be missing, the structures unsteady, the buildings ethereal and flimsy. He went on to investigate collapsing space and surface more explicitly during the aughts in an extended series of paintings that shifted from interior to exterior—producing unstable images of cabins and tree houses rendered in multi-dimensional, almost cubist perspective. Channeling Philip Guston, Georges Braque, Nancy Rubins, and Robert Smithson, those works depicted architecture and nature in increasingly fractured, tense compositions.

Forms piled and crushed, compressing into a frantic spatial aggregate where the artificial and natural brushed ever closer to pure abstraction. Then in 2010–11, Appel shifted again, turning from hand-rendered form, i.e. painted architecture, to the altogether tougher territory of painting over digital underprints. Working first with images of California’s polluted Salton Sea, then with images of concrete recycling facilities where concrete is pulverized to extract the tangled steel rebar inside, and later with the actual leavings of the studio archive, architectural decay serves as the substrate for purely abstract overpainting.

No longer bound by the dictates of painterly representation, where form is built up out of a gessoed void, this new approach has left the artist free to focus on the dissolution of form, using paint to act directly on and against the structure of an already existing image. And while his technique has shifted over the decades, one still sees a clear lineage in Appel’s colors, shapes, textures, and touch, and in the logic of his compositions, a logic that links all the way back to the late ’90s.

Like fresh piles on a landfill, Appel’s work builds in steamy, gamy, ever-piling strata, n bulldozed over and across the fecund ground of his leavings beneath.

Martin Basher is an artist based in New York City.

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Composite 26 (dog eared), 2017 Oil, acrylic, and UV cured ink on canvas over aluminum 70 x 60 inches 177.8 x 152.4 cm

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Composite 27 (slack-jaw), 2017 Oil, acrylic, and UV cured ink on canvas over aluminum 70 x 60 inches 177.8 x 152.4 cm

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Composite 28 (the argument), 2017 Oil, acrylic, and UV cured ink on canvas over aluminum 70 x 60 inches 177.8 x 152.4 cm

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Composite 29 (slipknot), 2017 Oil, acrylic, and UV cured ink on canvas over aluminum 70 x 60 inches 177.8 x 152.4 cm

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Composite 30 (amnesia), 2017 Oil, acrylic, and UV cured ink on canvas over aluminum 70 x 60 inches 177.8 x 152.4 cm

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Composite 31 (morning), 2017 Oil and UV cured ink on aluminum 43 x 32 inches 109.2 x 81.3 cm

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Composite 32 (nightfall), 2017 Oil and UV cured ink on aluminum 43 x 32 inches 109.2 x 81.3 cm

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Composite 33 (ox), 2017 Oil and UV cured ink on aluminum 43 x 32 inches 109.2 x 81.3 cm

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Composite 34 (seasons ruin), 2017 Oil and UV cured ink on aluminum 43 x 32 inches 109.2 x 81.3 cm

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Untitled Composite, 2017 Oil and UV cured ink on paper 40 x 28 inches 101.6 x 71.1 cm

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Untitled Composite, 2017 Oil and UV cured ink on paper 40 x 28 inches 101.6 x 71.1 cm

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Untitled Composite, 2017 Oil and UV cured ink on paper 40 x 28 inches 101.6 x 71.1 cm

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Untitled Composite, 2017 Oil and UV cured ink on paper 40 x 28 inches 101.6 x 71.1 cm

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Untitled Composite, 2017 Oil and UV cured ink on paper 40 x 28 inches 101.6 x 71.1 cm

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Untitled Composite, 2017 Oil and UV cured ink on paper 30 x 22 inches 76.2 x 55.9 cm

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Untitled Composite, 2017 Oil and UV cured ink on paper 30 x 22 inches 76.2 x 55.9 cm

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Untitled Composite, 2017 Oil and UV cured ink on paper 30 x 22 inches 76.2 x 55.9 cm

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Untitled Composite, 2017 Oil and UV cured ink on paper 30 x 22 inches 76.2 x 55.9 cm

KEVIN APPEL Born in Los Angeles, CA Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA EDUCATION 1995 MFA, University of California, Los Angeles 1990 BFA, Parsons School of Design, New York, NY

2004 Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY 2003 “Descripcion sin Lugar: Una Seleccion de Obras de Kevin Appel,” Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico 2002 Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 2001 Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY

SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2018 Miles McEnery Gallery at The Art Show, New York, NY 2017 “slip collapse then and,” Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

1999 Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 1998 Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2016 Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY 2014 Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY 2013 Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 2012 “Paintings,” Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City, CA 2009 “Drawings,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA 2008 The Suburban, Oak Park, IL Two Rooms Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand 2007 Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY 2006 Wilkinson Gallery, London, England Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2018 “Belief in Giants,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2016 “Instilled Life: The Art of the Domestic Object from the Permanent Collection of UCR Sweeney Art Gallery,” Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA 2015 “Black / White,” Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY “Endless House: Intersections of Art and Architecture,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY “Transcendent Abstraction in Painting: Selections from the Permanent Collection of UCR Sweeney Art Gallery,” Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA “Kaleidoscope: Abstraction in Architecture,” Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “XL: Large-Scale Paintings from the Permanent Collection,” The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY 2014 “Black / White,” LaMontagne Gallery, Boston, MA

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2013 “The Ghost of Architecture: Recent and Promised Gifts,” Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, WA “Lovers,” curated by Martin Basher, Starkwhite Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand “The Symbolic Landscape: Pictures Beyond the Picturesque,” curated by Juli Carson, University Art Gallery, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA “Paradox Maintenance Technicians,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA “Los Angeles Nomadic Division ‘Painting in Place,’” Farmers and Merchants Bank, Los Angeles, CA “Painting Two,” Two Rooms Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand

2005 “New Works on Paper,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “California Modern,” Orange County Museum of Art, Newport, CA

2012 “Kevin Appel, Canon Hudson, Betsy Lin Seder,” Samuel Freeman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2002 “Drawing Now: Eight Propositions,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY “Trespassing: Houses X Artists,” Bellevue Art Museum, Bellevue, WA; MAK Center, Los Angeles, CA “New Economy Painting,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA

2011 “LANY,” Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY “Beta Space: Kevin Appel and Ruben Ochoa,” San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA “Goldmine: Contemporary Works from the Collection of Sirje and Michael Gold,” University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach, CA 2010 “Small Paintings,” Two Rooms Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand “Haute,” Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art, Chaffey College, Rancho Cucamonga, CA “FAX,” Burnaby Art Gallery, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada “FAX,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA 2008 “Works on Paper,” Two Rooms Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand 2007 “Counterparts: Contemporary Painters and Their Influences,” Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, Virginia Beach, VA “The Last Show Cambridge Heath Road,” Wilkinson Gallery, London, England “Summer Stock,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 2006 “L.A.: NOW,” Galerie Dominique Fiat, Paris, France

2004 “ARTitecture,” Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, CA “From House to Home: Picturing Domesticity,” MOCA at the Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood, CA “Seeing Other People,” Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY 2003 “Variance,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2001 “New to the Modern: Recent Acquisitions,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY “It’s a Wild Party and We’re Having a Great Time,” Paul Morris Gallery, New York, NY “furor scribendi, Works on Paper,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “Works on Paper,” Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland “010101: Art in Technological Times,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA “Against Design,” Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, CA “Painting at the Edge of the World,” Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN “Next Wave Prints,” Elias Fine Art, Allston, MA 2000 “Do You Hear What We Hear?,” Paul Morris Gallery, New York, NY “Painting Show,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland “Drawing Spaces,” Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, IL “2 x 2: Architectural Collaborations,” Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA “Shifting Ground: Transformed Views of the American Landscape,” Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, WA

“Against Design,” Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Lake Worth, FL Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO “Architecture and Memory,” CRG, New York, NY 1999 “Farve Volumen / Color Volume,” Kunsthallen Brandts Klaedefabrike, Odense, Denmark “Down to Earth,” Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY “Drive-By: New Art from L.A.,” South London Gallery, London, England “The Perfect Life: Artifice in L.A. 1999,” Duke University Museum of Art, Durham, NC “Local Color,” The Harris Art Gallery, The University of La Verne, La Verne, CA “Biennial,” Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA “New Paintings from L.A.,” Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Switzerland 1998 “proof.positive.,” Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA “Abstract Painting Once Removed,” Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX “Architecture and Inside,” Paul Morris Gallery, New York, NY “Painting from Another Planet,” Deitch Projects, New York, NY “Paintings Interested in the Ideas of Architecture and Design,” PØST, Los Angeles, CA 1997 “Inhabited Spaces: Artist Depictions,” Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA “In Touch With…” Galerie + Edition Renate Schröder, Cologne, Germany “Kevin Appel, Francis Cape, Jorge Pardo,” Janice Guy, New York, NY “Beau Geste,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “Ten Los Angeles Artists,” Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco, CA “Bastards of Modernity,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 1996 “Interiors,” Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA

AWARDS 2011 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists Citibank Private Bank Emerging Artist Award, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA COLLECTIONS The Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY New York Public Library, New York, NY Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI Saatchi Gallery, London, England Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN

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Published on the occasion of The Art Show 28 February – 4 March 2018 Park Avenue Armory | New York

KEVIN APPEL Miles McEnery Gallery 525 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011 tel 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2018 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved 48

Essay © 2018 Martin Basher Photography by Jeff McLane Studio, Los Angeles, CA Catalogue designed by HHA Design, New York, NY ISBN: 978-0-9994871-3-6 Cover: Composite 29 (slipknot) (detail), 2017

MILES M c E N E RY G A L L E RY