Kevin Appel 2023

KEVIN APPEL

KEVIN APPEL

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

515 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

511 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

APPEL’S!ATTACHMENTS

By Molly Warnock

The images arrived by email, documents of works in progress. Studio views and frontal photographs showed mid and large-format canvases propped vertically on blocks or resting on the specially designed easels that enable the painter to silk-screen the supports in an upright position. One painting featured circular forms—most strikingly, a stylized sun— rendered in white on white; others displayed stacked tiers of irregular shapes in various colors, some geometric (a!enuated quadrilaterals, trapezoids, and triangles, in some instances tending toward mere slivers), some more organic in feeling (curving, leaf or flame-like components). There were visible repetitions of certain elements and sequences, whether within the same work or from one painting to the next. The details, meanwhile, disclosed untold strata of superimposed pa!erns: stripes, dots, grids, and flecks; the telltale grain of dramatically enlarged photographs. The layers ranged in translucency from milky veils to near-opaque laminas. Or so it all seemed on the computer screen.

Kevin Appel’s paintings are distinctive physical objects, prepared to exacting standards and built up over a period of weeks or months. The canvases, which are frequently life-size, or larger, are mounted on panels and primed with gesso to a porcelain finish; the subsequent paint coats, which in the present body of work pass from acrylic to oil, reveal a keen a!ention to the specific material properties of each medium. At times remarkably abstract in appearance, with buried, barely visible passages alongside more immediately legible incidents, the results demand sustained, in-person engagement. But they insist equally on the fundamental transformation of objectivity itself in a world of screens. It is not simply that their making is based in and mediated by screens, though this is an important fact about them. It is also that they ask what it means for paintings to have objects today—a"er the fantasy of pure form embodied in modernist abstraction, a"er the semiotic play of postmodernism, a"er the rise of digital technology. The figure of the screen is at the heart of this investigation. What that means, however, changes over time.

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Two moments provide some sense of Appel’s path to date. In the first, the screen is architectural.1 The key objects here—at once the deep context and the clearest foil for the current work—are the large-format paintings on canvas over panel that Appel produced in 2011 and entitled Screens, following an earlier body of works on paper by the same name.

These compositions inaugurated the procedure he was to deploy, with various modifications, for several years and in several series that followed. Having gathered a particular corpus of images—in this case, found photographs of nature from a Time Life book series familiar to the artist from his childhood—Appel enlarged those photographs digitally and used a flatbed UV printer to transfer them directly to the surfaces of his scrupulously prepared supports.

The next step involved painting atop those images in such a way as to partially obscure the printed ma!er. Gestural brushstrokes swirl and meander atop crashing surf and prairie grass; flatly painted shapes tilt in space or unite to form intricate overlays. The situation evoked by the la!er, in the painter’s telling, is one of “looking through architecture out into nature.”2 That nature, moreover, is implicitly located in the past, distanced visually by the blown-up rose!es of the images’ original—and now long outmoded—printing technology.

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It is telling that the collage-like forms that compose these screens especially recall Russian Suprematism and Constructivism, as if taking those movements as metonyms for “nonobjective” abstraction more generally. Superimposed upon images of the world that those visual systems ostensibly failed to transform, the screens initially appear merely to divide us from that world, both spatially and, as it were, temporally, the frontal shapes as if frozen in a perpetual present. Yet the se!lement of screen and object quickly proves more complex: first, because modernist abstraction, too, is among Appel’s most-cherished “objects;” second, because the screens are not indifferent to the imagery below them but are visibly responsive to it;3 third (and most important), because the photographs, too, are so many screens, their mediated status clearly flagged. This is not a screen versus a world but a world of screens.

The second moment is that of the 2017 Composites. To make these paintings, Appel collaged together found images and photographs he had taken himself. These referential elements were integrated into layered, sculptural configurations produced by bending and twisting the various paper supports, some involving quasi-Matissean cutout forms. (These configurations were then photographed, producing new, two-dimensional images that Appel 1. A fuller telling of this story would begin with some of Appel’s earliest paintings, the depictions of interiors based on houses designed with the aid of a computer. There, the screen was part of a working process that did not necessarily show up in the final works. For reasons of space, I am jumping in at the moment the screen first enters the picture.

2. “Kevin Appel Speaks at the Vermont Studio Center,” February 8, 2016. h!ps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvKpJHE0W1s&list=WL&index=63&t=2s.

Le": Olga Rozanova, Non-Objective Composition. Color Painting, 1917 Right: Kevin Appel, Barn Owl 1, 2009

flatbed-printed onto canvases mounted on aluminum.) Among the cutouts, one in particular, conjures the artist’s earlier play with overlays: a sheet with large round excisions reminiscent of a Jean Prouvé screen. Once again, one has the initial impression of looking through something to imagery that is located on the other side. Yet the topology has become more intricate, for the rephotographed imagery, too, folds and curls in space, at times appearing less as a separate layer than as the screen’s inner lining.

The current work institutes a new paradigm, one founded on the explicit fusion of imagery and screen. As in previous series, Appel deploys various kinds of photographic source material, including images of—among other things—a wrought iron grill by Antoni Gaudí; shadows on a brick façade; a terrazzo surface; a concrete utilities cover glimpsed in the street; and aspects of Arcosanti, the experimental metropolis in the Arizona desert that Appel visited in both childhood and adulthood. Rooted in specific encounters with things in the world, the photographs have been divested of ready legibility in the course of their subsequent itineraries in digital space, where they have been variously cropped, blown out, and enlarged—reduced, in many cases, to something approaching abstract pa!erns. Transferred to the surfaces of Appel’s paintings, these ghostly, grainy elements at times conjure simplified motifs present both in the painter’s earlier work and in pictorial modernism more generally, from cubism to color field. They nonetheless retain a diffuse indexical relationship to the surfaces and textures of the real—a sense of things seen, 3. In this respect, it is tempting to compare the Screens to the détourned paintings produced in the 1950s and ’60s by Asger Jorn and Enrico Baj, among others associated with the Situationist International. Executed atop found paintings, including academic landscape paintings, done by others, Jorn’s modifications o"en interact with their substrate in suggestive and unexpected ways; Appel’s more painterly gestures throughout his Screens at times recall Jorn’s.

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if no longer localizable. As contrasted with the substrates of the earlier Screens, however, these images are not clearly relegated to the past; rather, they a!est to a more general sense of absence or separateness, one that now appears thoroughly mediated by digital technology.

Yet, it is here that painting’s own materiality comes meaningfully into play, bringing us back to a certain resistance or opacity proper to the medium. For, rather than printing the image on the canvas at the outset and then doing something to—that is, upon—that image, Appel builds up the current paintings through the repeated layering of the diverse elements via silk-screen (but not with silk-screen ink; the painter instead deploys acrylic and oil media for which the meshes are not adapted). Where previously the image was interrupted or obscured by overlying forms and gestures, the images in these paintings interrupt themselves; they get in their own way. That Appel is very o"en working wet-intowet, or at any rate wet-into-humid, is also to the point: the process is both additive and subtractive in one and the same gesture, the matrix pulling up paint as well as laying it down.

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At this stage, it is unclear how much, if any, of the source imagery will remain to be seen in the completed works. Appel has expressed the wish that the paintings might function similarly to the Brutalist structures he most admires, effectively a!aining something of the la!ers’ “extruded monolithic sensibility.”4 This can sound like an old dream of modernism: the passage from representation to pure presentation, from seeming to being. Yet Appel’s a!achment to Brutalist architecture might point us equally to an ethics of the “as found,” described by the scholar Ben Highmore as “an obligation to respond to the objective world, a responsibility to be responsive.”5 An entanglement, in other words, from which there can be no exit.

Molly Warnock is an arts writer, editor, and curator based in Baltimore, MD. 4. Personal communication to the author, November 26, 2022.

5. Ben Highmore, “‘Image-breaking, God-making’: Paolozzi’s Brutalism.” October 136 (Spring 2011): 95.

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Aggregate 1 (dim token), 2023 Acrylic on canvas over panel 80 x 68 inches 203.2 x 172.7 cm

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Aggregate 2 (clot), 2023 Acrylic on canvas over panel 80 x 68 inches 203.2 x 172.7 cm

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Aggregate 3 (cascade), 2023 Acrylic on canvas over panel 70 x 60 inches 177.8 x 152.4 cm

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Aggregate 4 (solarium), 2023 Acrylic on canvas over panel 80 x 68 inches 203.2 x 172.7 cm

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Title of Painting, 2018 Oil on canvas 78 3/4 x 59 inches 200 x 150 cm

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Aggregate 5 (blue facade), 2023 Oil and acrylic on canvas over panel 60 x 48 inches 152.4 x 121.9 cm

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Aggregate 6 (bulwark), 2023

Oil and acrylic on canvas over panel 60 x 48 inches 152.4 x 121.9 cm

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Aggregate 7 (autumn), 2023

Oil and acrylic on canvas over panel 70 x 60 inches 177.8 x 152.4 cm

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Aggregate 8 (night occlusion), 2023 Oil and acrylic on canvas over panel 70 x 60 inches 177.8 x 152.4 cm

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Title of Painting, 2018 Oil on canvas 78 3/4 x 59 inches 200 x 150 cm

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Aggregate 9 (slab), 2023

Oil and acrylic on canvas over panel 60 x 48 inches 152.4 x 121.9 cm

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Aggregate 10 (burnt arrangement), 2023 Oil and acrylic on canvas over panel 60 x 48 inches 152.4 x 121.9 cm

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Aggregate 11 (rose veil), 2023

Oil and acrylic on canvas over panel 80 x 68 inches 203.2 x 172.7 cm

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Aggregate 12 (passage), 2023 Acrylic on canvas over panel 80 x 68 inches 203.2 x 172.7 cm

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Title of Painting, 2018 Oil on canvas 78 3/4 x 59 inches 200 x 150 cm

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Title of Painting, 2018 Oil on canvas 78 3/4 x 59 inches 200 x 150 cm

KEVIN APPEL Born in 1967 in Los Angeles, CA Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

2008 The Suburban, Chicago, IL Two Rooms Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand 2007 Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY

EDUCATION 1995 MFA, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 1990 BFA, Parsons School of Design, New York, NY

2004 Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2003 “Descripcion sin lugar: Una Seleccion de Obras de Kevin Appel,” Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico

2023 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

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2006 Wilkinson Gallery, London, United Kingdom Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

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

2002 Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 2001 Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY

2016 Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY

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

2014 Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY

1998 Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2013 Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 2012 “Paintings,” Susanne Vielme!er Los Angeles Projects, Culver City, CA 2009 “Drawings,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA

GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2018 “EVOLVER,” L.A. Louver, Los Angeles, CA “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,” The 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,” Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY 2014 “Black/White,” LaMontagne Gallery, Boston, MA 2013 “The Ghost of Architecture: Recent and Promised Gi"s,” Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Sea!le, 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

2012 “Kevin Appel, Canon Hudson, Betsy Lin Seder,” Samuel Freeman Gallery, 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, Long Beach, CA 2010 “Small Paintings,” Two Rooms Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand “Haute,” Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art, Chaffey College, Rancho Cucamunga, 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, 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 Fiat, Paris, France 2005 “New Works on Paper,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “California Modern,” Orange County Museum of Art, Newport, CA 2004 “ARTitecture,” Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, CA “From House to Home: Picturing Domesticity,” Museum of Contemporary Art Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles, CA “Seeing Other People,” Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY

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2003 “Variance,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 2002 “Drawing Now: Eight Propositions,” The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY “Trespassing: House X Artists,” Bellevue Art Museum, Bellevue, Washington; traveled to MAK Center, Los Angeles, CA “New Economy Painting,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA

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2001 “New to the Modern: Recent Acquisitions,” The 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 “Shi"ing Ground: Transformed Views of the American Landscape,” Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Sea!le, 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,” Kunstmuseum Brandts, Odense, Denmark “Down to Earth,” Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY “Drive-By: New Art from L.A.,” South London Gallery, London, United Kingdom “The Perfect Life: Artifice in L.A. 1999,” Duke University Museum of Art, Durham, NC “Local Color,” Harris Art Gallery, University of La Verne, La Verne, CA “1999 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

SELECT COLLECTIONS

2011 California Community Foundation Fellowship of Visual Artists, Los Angeles, CA

Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

1999 Citibank Private Bank Emerging Artist Award, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA

Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA

Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA

TEACHING EXPERIENCE The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY 2023 Professor and Department Chair; Executive Director of University Art Galleries, Claire Trevor School of the Arts, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA

The New York Public Library, New York, NY Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI Saatchi Collection, London, United Kingdom Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition

KEVIN!APPEL 16 March - 22 April 2023 Miles McEnery Gallery 525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2023 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2023 Molly Warnock Director of Exhibitions Anastasija Jevtovic, New York, NY Publications & Archival Assistant Julia Schlank, New York, NY Photography by Christopher Burke Studio, Los Angeles, CA Catalogue Layout by Sean Kennedy, New York, NY ISBN: 978-0-9850184-2-9 Cover: Aggregate 10 (burnt arrangement), (detail), 2023