Issuu

ALEX KANEVSKY

MARCH 17–APRIL 16, 2022 ESSAY BY JASON ROSENFELD

HOLLIS TAGGART 521 WEST 26TH STREET, 1ST FLOOR NEW YORK, NY 10001

POSTCARDS FROM A CLOSET

PLATE 1 PEGGY’S BATHROOM, 2021, OIL ON PANEL, 18 × 18 IN (45.7 × 45.7 CM)

A L E X K A N E V S K Y I S A N U N C O M M O N H U M A N B E I N G . One only needs to engage him in conversation to realize that he always brings a unique perspective to any discussion. His erudite mind travels in unusual paths as he navigates the world around him. It is this singular and particular awareness combined with his heightened insight that makes him such an extraordinary artist. His mastery of the techniques of painting is indisputable—he is a seasoned painter, technically brilliant with a highly-developed sense of color. With his brush he creates mesmerizing imagery that is both cerebral and sensual and has a fluid lyricism. This much-anticipated, remarkable group of new works reveals Alex’s multilayered approach to abstraction and figuration. Curiously, he captures movement while simultaneously offering a sense of stillness. Utilizing a unique painterly language, Alex entices the viewer into his visionary world in which narratives are subjective and grow deeper upon closer examination. He offers vignettes to contemplate: a couple in conversation aside enigmatic architecture, a passing glimpse of a bride, and voyeuristic scenes of nudes. And, when he turns to nature as subject matter, the result is equally stunning and intriguing. The seasonal landscapes of the majestic mountains as well as the dense, concentrated closeup of the apple tree show an alluring artistic response to what is real and imagined. Alex’s knowledge and integration of the history of art manifests in subtle and thought-provoking ways. Figures are often presented stylistically with a nod to the masters of portraiture such as Rembrandt and Velázquez. When asked about his own artistic influences, Alex names a long and diverse list of artists, writers, and philosophers. The inspiration of post-war figural painters such as Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon is immediately apparent in his moody, abstracted figures. The roots of Alex’s color can be found in the work of Van Gogh, Seurat, and Richard Diebenkorn, among others. The artist also admires the work of literary greats such as Tolstoy, James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, and Ezra Pound and finds an arresting beauty in the forms of Japanese pottery and the colors of Scandinavian cinema. These manifold interests find their way into his body of work that is both compelling and mysterious and secures his place in the contemporary artworld.

H O L L I S TA G G A R T DEBRA PESCI

JASON ROSENFELD

THE ARTIST IN RETIREMENT: POSTCARDS FROM A CLOSET A FEW YEARS AGO, Alex Kanevsky permanently relocated 400 miles north from Philadelphia— where he had lived since moving from Russia in 1983—to Tamworth, New Hampshire, after visiting and living on the southern cusp of the White Mountains off and on for most of his American life. This move, to secluded woods and a self-designed, handmade house with a separate studio that swivels on a great lazy Susan, has occasioned a shift in Kanevsky’s art: a poetic, responsive, reflective, and even more environs-impacted series of paintings produced under COVID-19. It is reminiscent of a similar and then-novel move away from the metropolis in the English Enlightenment, an exit strategy employed by poets and painters and landscape gardeners in the mid-to-late-eighteenth century termed “retirement.” Retirement, in the case of those British Arcadia-seekers, did not result in a diminution of production but, rather, new forms responding to a philosophically tinged retreat from urban London and its society, a rethinking of subjects and approaches in their art.1 British Augustan age retirement poets such as William Shenstone and Alexander Pope impacted the rising star Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788), the painter of multiple genres who introduced bravura brushwork into the period and married images of society and nature, forming a late eighteenth-century link between his Baroque hero Anthony van Dyck and Gainsborough’s late nineteenth-century acolytes John Singer Sargent and John Everett Millais. Kanevsky’s brushwork, so fluid and suggestive, is a firm part of this lineage, as is the way his art encourages literary associations. And, like Gainsborough, he considers his art analogous to music.2 For the art historian Marcia Pointon, Gainsborough’s “fancy pictures” of the period (fig. 1), imaginative scenes of contemporary and cottage (rural) life coupled with landscape elements, are “vehicles for contemplation,” often of a religious and moral nature. Such eighteenth-century works “constitute an art of retirement that involves the serious contemplation of man in a fallen state.”3 In the present exhibition, Kanevsky’s apples, turkeys that malevolently intrude upon the sleep of reason, pumpkin menaced by a knife wielded with the deliberateness of Judith sawing through the neck of Holofernes, drunken 1980s revelers, models enacting interrelations in a

FIGURE 1 Thomas Gainsborough, Sunset: Carthorses Drinking at a Stream, c. 1760. Oil paint on canvas, 56 1/2 × 60 1/2 in. Tate, London, Acquisition Presented by Robert Vernon, 1847, N00310 FIGURE 2 Francisco Goya y Lucientes, Plate 43 from “Los Caprichos”: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, 1799. Etching and aquatint, plate: 8 3/8 × 5 15/16 in.; sheet: 11 5/8 × 8 1/4 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of M. Knoedler & Co., 1918, 18.64(43)

series of repeated and inescapable rooms, and inscrutable mountains disinterested in the vagaries of human existence constitute a sophisticated and decentralized reaction to our own troubled present. Retirement has somehow given the isolated artist a broader purview. In Kanevsky’s work, as ever, contemplation is key, though spirituality is not a primary focus. Symbols abound if you choose to read them that way. Meditation and introspection can be occasioned by refulgent fruit, mundane yet mysterious narratives, grand mountains emerging from scumbled and active foregrounds, tenebrist female nudes, and visual puzzles of domestic interiors. Kanevsky’s pictures fall into multiple different categories—landscape, portraiture, genre scenes, still lifes—but the surface achieved through oils deployed using an array of squared off brushes and small rubber scrapers or squeegees on mostly square supports includes dynamic effects and scrims of color that are fabricated consistently, regardless of subject. He insists that his art is about painting and not subjects, and that his is a responsive art that depends on the viewer to complete it. This is perhaps best proven in the banality of tried-and-true themes—mountains, nude female models, or flowers. They embrace potential and uncertainty and resist exposition and clarity, whether descriptive or didactic. Some pictures take this to an enhanced level. 4 In Sleep of Reason (pl. 12), as in Goya’s print from Los Caprichos (fig. 2), enlightenment is in abeyance. While Goya’s restless and tortured artist, suffering from artist’s block, is beset by gothic fauna such as lynxes and owls and bats and black cats, Kanevsky’s recumbent and relaxed female nude is intruded upon by three grandiose turkeys, like avid male medical students in a

FIGURE 3 Ann Sophia Towne Darrah, Mount Chocorua, New Hamphire, 1856. Oil on canvas, 26 × 38 in. Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, N.H., Henry Melville Fuller Fund, 1994.8

Rembrandt picture crowding over a cadaver. Inspired by massive fowl at the annual Columbus Day weekend Sandwich Fair, Kanevsky’s produced this mash-up of a picture, also including a white bedspread with a blue, foliated pattern that resembles Matisse’s designs and a buildup of landscape and clouds in the right background.5 The stretched out female body is like the one on the canvas underneath the similarly spread-out form of Mount Whiteface in The Mountain Painted over a Nude (pl. 8). Edgar Degas also repurposed compositions with female nudes in his late monoprint landscapes series and the conflation of the female body with nature has both a classical pedigree and a rebirth in the work of Giorgione and Titian in the Venetian Renaissance, as well as in Kanevsky’s own Midori in the Mountains (2019) and other works. The exhibition also includes four 18 x 18-inch panels of pictures of models that he often refers to as portraits and in whose titles includes their initials, such as J. F. H. at Night and J. F. H. at Night 2 (pl. 13), thus maintaining a degree of anonymity while acknowledging a certain amount of self-fashioning in their representation and denial of narrative. Models come regularly to the studio, and to a degree Kanevsky collaborates with them in conceiving works. The J. F. H. pictures employ the artist’s typical tenebrist, inky black backgrounds and then dissolve the white bodies into scrims of flesh/paint, often using his signature Prussian Blue tone, as in the left arm in Bride (pl. 14), the same color found in a more saturated and thicker form in Peggy’s Bathroom (pl. 1) and Postcards from a Closet (pl. 5), discussed below. The two largest and most stunning works in this show are both interiors, of a kind. Apple Tree from Inside (pl. 4), at five-and-a half-feet square, imagines a view up a ladder and in the

FIGURE 4 Abbott Handerson Thayer, Mount Monadnock, c. 1918. Oil on panel, 48 3/8 × 60 1/2 in. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Purchased with funds provided by Cecile Bartman, M2002.51

thick of late summer. At the left, a planetary-sized green apple emerges from the enveloping foliage and at right, slightly farther back, more of the globular fruit hang against leaves and slight gaps revealing sky. The picture is disorienting—lacking ground or horizon or upper reaches. Instead, you are thrust into the hyperspace of the inner tree.6 The sheer range of greens delight— courtesy of the artist’s favored small-batch RGH pigments made near Albany, New York—and aerobic viewing is encouraged: the mysteriousness of the picture and its flickering surface are revealed both from afar and at close range. In the by contrast firmly geometric Postcards from a Closet (pl. 5), Kanevsky has broken the four-foot square panel into a painted 3 x 6 grid of vertically-scaled rectangles. It is a subject he has been painting for years, in works such as Four Doors (2012) and Walk in Closet (2018)—a closet and a bedroom in the house of one of his earliest landlords in New Hampshire, local musician/artist/librarian Peggy Johnson. The smaller Peggy’s Bathroom features a tub in a room in the same house. In Postcards from a Closet, Kanevsky asked his models to act out generalized scenarios and tried to record them in some of the spaces. The result is a series of alternating images of vacancy and habitation, like a cutaway view of an apartment building with its innards—architectural form, physical interrelationships, and psychological memory—revealed. In venturing out during COVID to depopulated fields to paint the prominent southern peaks of the nearby White Mountains, Mount Whiteface, and Mount Chocorua, Kanevsky is following in the footsteps of residents/artists both familiar and unheralded, such as E. E. Cummings (1894–1962) who lived on Joy Farm in Madison, New Hampshire, less than ten miles away, and

FIGURE 5 Charles Rennie Mackinstosh, Peonies, c. 1920. Watercolor, gouache, and graphite on paper, 17 × 17 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1993.339

who painted quasi-symbolist, John Marin-like watercolors and oils of his environs, including Mount Chocorua. Philadelphia-born Anna Sophia Towne Darrah (1819–1881) channeled Thomas Cole in painting that same natural landmark in 1856 in a pastoral mode, including an untroubled shepherd and his sheep, a picture in the collection of the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire (fig. 3).7 Kanevsky’s four mountain images are all on 24 x 48-inch panels and were largely painted en plein air and late in the afternoon when the light enhances their bulk. 8 Three are of Whiteface (pls. 8, 10, and 11) and one, The Mountain, Summer (pl. 9), is of Chocorua. The active surfaces inevitably recall Cézanne’s engagement with both Mont Saint-Victoire and passage, but the tonality and lack of finish and pattern of Kanevsky’s images are closer to Abbot Handerson Thayer’s (1849–1921) superb and often unfinished late Symbolist paintings of southern New Hampshire’s Mount Monadnock (fig. 4), a mountain Kanevsky painted some fifteen years ago. Back in the studio, nature in reduced form is found in the two-foot square still life Tulips in Time (pl. 3) which builds on a theme of entropy established in a series of four Peony Variations pictures from 2019. Kanevsky’s Tulips resembles a late watercolor of peonies by the great Scottish designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh from circa 1920 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 5). Both feature colored and stylized backgrounds with vibrating lines and serve as updates on the still-life tradition, on the theme of the memento mori, concentrated painted disquisitions on the natural world consigned to perish. Mackintosh, painting rus in urbe in London in the last decade of his life and desperate for cash, gave us the flowers themselves, uncharacteristically for him unstylized but with a trippy, imaginative background. Kanevsky injects time into the equation and title, condensing bud/bloom/decay into a riotous mash of color. The picture has a rising feeling, both in the subject and the ribboned background. But the Fall is coming.

An artist in retirement does not mean an artist without a community. Nor does it mean pastoral elegies and Edenic views of country life—as in Gainsborough’s day. Kanevsky’s new set of psychological and natural paintings in retirement bears a spirit of collaboration: in his work with his models; his dialogue with local memory in reactivating spaces he once lived in in pictures such as Postcards from the Closet; his sense of confrontation with mountains similarly addressed by his local forebears; and that singularly spectacular and immersive experience of nature in Apple Tree from Inside. The artist in his sylvan closet of a spinning studio, nonetheless, continues to address the world. West Village, New York City February 2022

Jason Rosenfeld, Ph.D., is Professor of Art History at Marymount Manhattan College, New York, and a Senior Writer and Editor-at-Large at The Brooklyn Rail. He is the author of John Everett Millais (Phaidon, 2012) and co-author of a monograph on Cecily Brown (Phaidon, 2020). He was curator of Ben Wilson: From Social Realism to Abstraction, at the George Segal Gallery, Montclair State University, New Jersey (2017); co-curator of the exhibition River Crossings at Cedar Grove, the Thomas Cole National Historical Site in Catskill, New York, and Olana in Hudson, New York (2015); co-curator of Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde at the Tate, London, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Mori Arts Center Gallery, Tokyo, and the Palazzo Chiablese, Turin (2012–14); and co-curator of John Everett Millais at the Tate, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Fukuoka, Japan, and Bunkamura Museum, Tokyo (2007–08).

4. In Kanevsky’s last show at the gallery, Liberation and Disorientation of 2019, that place was held by the standout work, Nurses with Wine (2019), and in 2017 in the former seventh-floor space at 521 West 26th there was the stunning Rückenfigur without a vista, J. F. H. with Nature Blanket (2016) and the 66-inch square Dinner on a Battlefield (2017).

The writer would like to thank Alex Kanevsky for welcoming him to his studio on January 26, 2022, and Debra Pesci, Kara Spellman, and Jessie Sentivan for their help on this project.

NOTES

5. A similar female figure/ground/sky dynamic in a realm of grand scope can be seen in Model with an Apple and the Planes (2018) and Hero in a Landscape (2015).

1. Marcia Pointon, “Gainsborough and the Language of Retirement,” Art History 2, no. 4 (December 1979): 441–55. In relation to this theme, Kanevsky is also haunted by a photograph from 1882 or 1883 of the poet Arthur Rimbaud, who retired from writing at the age of twenty-one, backed by banana trees in a garden in Harar, Eastern Ethiopia. He is working on a new painting in response to this image.

6. This type of play with the equivalent of focal lengths in vision and immersion in foliage on a macroscopic level can be traced back to works such Landscape with Grass (2005). 7. See “Mount Chocorua, New Hampshire,” Currier Museum of Art, collections.currier.org/objects-1/info/ 142?sort=0.

2. See Lindsay Stainton, Gainsborough and His Musical Friends (London: Greater London Council, 1977). Kanevsky frequently discusses his art in relation to music: Bach fugues, symphonic overlapping of forms, rhythms. It is an avenue in his art that needs exploration.

8. Kanevsky says they were each painted in around six sessions in the outdoors in front of the motif and then for an hour or so after each session in the studio while the colors remained fresh in his mind.

3. Pointon, 451.

PLATE 2 4 AM, 2021, OIL ON PANEL, 18 × 18 IN (45.7 × 45.7 CM)

PLATE 3 TULIPS IN TIME, 2021, OIL ON PANEL, 24 × 24 IN (61 × 61 CM)

PLATE 4 APPLE TREE FROM INSIDE, 2021, OIL ON LINEN, 66 × 66 IN (167.6 × 167.6 CM)

PLATE 5 POSTCARDS FROM A CLOSET, 2021, OIL ON PANEL, 48 × 48 IN (121.9 × 121.9 CM)

PLATE 6 CONVERSATION, 2022, OIL ON PANEL, 18 × 18 IN (45.7 × 45.7 CM)

PLATE 7 CUT, 2021, OIL ON PANEL, 18 × 18 IN (45.7 × 45.7 CM)

PLATE 8 THE MOUNTAIN PAINTED OVER A NUDE, 2021, OIL ON PANEL, 24 × 48 IN (61 × 121.9 CM) PLATE 9 THE MOUNTAIN, SUMMER, 2021, OIL ON PANEL, 24 × 48 IN (61 × 121.9 CM)

PLATE 10 THE MOUNTAIN, SPRING, 2021, OIL ON PANEL, 24 × 48 IN (61 × 121.9 CM) PLATE 11 THE MOUNTAIN, FALL, 2021, OIL ON PANEL, 24 × 48 IN (61 × 121.9 CM)

PLATE 12 SLEEP OF REASON, 2021, OIL ON LINEN, 36 × 48 IN (91.4 × 121.9 CM)

PLATE 13 J.F.H. AT NIGHT 2, 2021, OIL ON PANEL, 18 × 18 IN (45.7 × 45.7 CM)

PLATE 14 BRIDE, 2021, OIL ON PANEL, 18 × 18 IN (45.7 × 45.7 CM)

PLATE 15 NIGHT OUT, 2021, OIL ON PANEL, 18 × 18 IN (45.7 × 45.7 CM)

PA I N T E R A L E X K A N E V S K Y C A P T U R E S M O V E M E N T and time’s constant flow in canvases that resist adherence to a single moment, or even a single reading. Like the unreliable nature of memory and the imprecise atmosphere of poetry, Kanevsky’s multilayered works provide more questions than answers. These paintings combine abstraction and figuration in layered, painterly compositions in which the artist strives to convey his own personal, and particular, view of the world with clarity. Kanevsky describes himself as a slow painter who must nevertheless work quickly to maintain a fresh approach to the canvas. His process of painting, rubbing out, and painting over was developed over many years and holds the key to the emotional richness of his work. This creates a kind of palimpsest, in which past iterations and experimentations remain visible beneath the topmost layer of paint. Though Kanevsky paints both from life and from photographs, he relishes most the kinetic energy of live models. He often works with the same models for years at a time, developing a strong sense of their individual form and motion. The figure is central to Kanevsky’s work. They inhabit mysterious landscapes and ambiguous architecture, often composed of wide swaths of color that contain echoes of color field painting. Most often, he focuses on the nude, creating soft, tactile bodies in luscious flesh tones. Born in Russia in 1963, Kanevsky studied theoretical mathematics at Vilnius University in Lithuania before coming to the United States in the early 1980s. He settled in Philadelphia and began painting classes at the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in 1989. After receiving a Pew Fellowship in 1997, Kanevsky was able to devote himself to painting full time, and from 2002 to 2017, he served as an adjunct painting instructor at PAFA. The artist has had over twenty solo shows, and has exhibited his work throughout the United States, Canada, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Ireland. He lives and works in New Hampshire.

ALEX KANEVSKY Born 1963 in Rostov-na-Donu, Russia Lives and works in New Hampshire EDUCATION 1989–93 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia 1980–83 Vilnius University, Lithuania SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2020 Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco 2019 Hollis Taggart, New York 2018 Galerie Guido Romero Pierini, Paris Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco 2017 Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York

2011 J. Cacciola Gallery, New York 2010 Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco 2009 J. Cacciola Gallery, New York 2008 Rosenfeld Gallery, Philadelphia Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco 2007 J. Cacciola Gallery, New York 2006 Gallerie de Bellefeuille, Montreal, Canada 2005 Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco J. Cacciola Gallery, New York

2016 Foster Gallery, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA

2004 J. Cacciola Gallery, New York Rosenfeld Gallery, Philadelphia Somerville Manning Gallery, Greenville, DE

2015 Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York

2003 Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco J. Cacciola Galleries, New York

2014 J. Cacciola Gallery, New York Scarfone/Hartly Gallery at University of Tampa, FL

2002 Rosenfeld Gallery, Philadelphia

2013 Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco 2012 Barbara Frigerio Contemporary Art, Milan, Italy J. Cacciola Gallery, New York Woodmere Museum, Philadelphia Lux Art Institute, Encinitas, CA

2001 Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco J. Cacciola Galleries, New York 2000 Philadelphia Art Alliance Rosenfeld Gallery, Philadelphia 1998 Rosenfeld Gallery, Philadelphia

1997 Merrimack College, Andover, MA Somerville Manning Gallery, Greenville, DE 1995 Rosenfeld Gallery, Philadelphia SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2021 Tasting Menu, Barnes Art Center, Hopewell Junction, NY Eros, tu cuerpo como excusa, Museo Europeo de Arte Moderno, Barcelona, Spain 2020 Figure as Form, Hollis Taggart, New York Biophilia, Sugarlift, New York Dallas Art Fair, Hollis Taggart, New York The Food Show, SFA Projects, New York, curated by Chantal Lee and Jeffrey Morabito 2019 SHIFT, Susquehanna Art Museum, Harrisburg, PA Selections from our Contemporary Collection, Hollis Taggart, New York Lightning Strikes II, Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco What’s for Dinner? A Brief History of Food in Art, The Galerie Gmurzynska, New York An Inherently Hopeful Gesture, Cerulean Arts, Philadelphia, curated by Bill Scott Innovation and Vitality: 150 Years of Alumni from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Avery Galleries, Bryn Mawr, PA 2018 The Figure: The Indicative and the Allusive, The Delaware Contemporary, Wilmington, DE, curated by Kathrine Page Disrupted Realism, Stanek Gallery, Philadelphia, curated by John Seed Five at Nine, Hollis Taggart, New York Painters Who Fucking Know How to Paint, Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle We the People: Contemporary American Figurative Art, Mesa Arts Center, AZ

Létat des Limbes, Alex Kanevsky and Edwige Fouvry, Galerie Guido Romero Pierni, Paris 12+1, Meno Parkas, Kaunas, Lithuania 2017 Ethics of Depiction, Oakland University Art Gallery, Rochester, MI, curated by Dick Goody A More Perfect Union? Power, Sex, and Race in the Representation of Couples, Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia In the Absence of Color: Artists Working in Black and White, Hollis Taggart, New York Artist as Subject: 20th Anniversary Exhibition, Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco 2016 More Than Your Selfie, New Museum Los Gatos, CA 50 Shades of Red, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Uncatchable, Guido Romero Pierini Galerie, Paris 2015 Lightning Strikes I, Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco The More the Merrier, Cerulean Gallery, Philadelphia, curated by Bill Scott 2013 Body Politic, National Arts Club, New York, curated by Courtney Jordan & Kristin Künc The Philadelphia Story, Asheville Art Museum, NC 2012 Annual Show, Royal Society of British Artists, London, invited guest artist 2011 Being Body / Exhibited Bodies, Barbara Frigerio Gallery, Milan, Italy Accumulations, J. Cacciola, New York 2010 Remnants, Fuse Gallery, New York Visual Voices, Stedman Gallery, Rutgers University, NJ, curated by Nancy Maguire

2009 The Morbid Anatomy Cabinet, Barrister’s Gallery, New Orleans, curated by Joanna Ebenstein Five Artists of Accomplishment from PAFA, Somerville Manning Gallery, Greenville, DE 2008 Into Your Head, Hopkinson House Gallery of Contemporary Art, Haddon Township, NJ Painterly Painting: The Next Level, The Art Museum of Los Gatos, CA Waves & X-Rays, Edwards Art Gallery, Holderness School, Plymouth, NH Images from North Mayo, Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ballycastle, Ireland Edwards Art Gallery, Holderness School, Plymouth, NH 2007 Finding a Form, Tower Gallery, Philadelphia True Love Always, Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA, curated by Rebecca Campbell 10 Year Anniversary, Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco 2006 Bader Fund, The First Three Years, Brady Art Gallery, George Washington University, Washington, DC 2005 Very Early Pictures, Arcadia University Art Gallery, Glenside, PA Figura, Gallerie de Bellefeuille, Montreal, Canada 2004 Pittura e fotografia dal punto di vista dell’occhio modern, Castell Welsberg, Italy Works on Paper 2004, Arcadia University Art Gallery, Glenside, PA Paintings & Photographs, Alex Kanevsky and Jon Redmond, J. Cacciola Gallery, New York 2003 Mostra di Opere in Formato Piccolo, Casa Wassermann, Villabassa, Italy

2001 Form & Figure, J. Cacciola Galleries, New York 1999 The Edge of Vision, The Edge of Sight, Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA 1998 Through the Heart of the City, Art Alliance, Philadelphia Pertaining to Philadelphia, Mulligan-Shanoski Gallery, San Francisco 1997 Contemporary Landscape, The Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art, Ursinus College, Collegeville, PA 1994 Double Exposure, Pleiades Gallery, New York, curated by Dore Ashton SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Tamsin Smith, “All That Is Solid Melts Into Paint: An Essay on the Works of Alex Kanevsky,” Juxtapoz, September 30, 2020. Alice Puig, “20 Picks From The Dallas Art Fair,” Create Magazine, April 23, 2020. Rochelle Belsito, “Shift: A New Exhibition Featuring the Artwork of Tiffany Calvert and Alex Kanevsky Explores the Passage of Time,” American Art Collector, February 2020. Oksana Berzinsh, “Hollis Taggart Showcases Alex Kanevsky’s Fluid Brushstroke,” Fine Art Globe, September 24, 2019. Rochelle Belsito, “Ends and Beginnings,” American Art Collector, November 2018. Kim Power, “The Laws of Motion: In-Studio Interview with Alex Kanevsky,” Art Pulse Magazine, 2017. Amanda S. Torres Cunha, Caminhos em Poética Visuais Bidimensionais (Brazil: Editora Intersaberes, 2017.) Lightning Strikes: 18 Poets, 18 Artists (San Francisco: Dolby Chadwick Gallery, 2016.) “Chamem-lhe pintor, não artista,” Diário de Notícias, February 21, 2015.

Marie-Christine Horn, La Piqûre (Switzerland: L’Age D’Homme, 2015). Peter Selz, Frances Malcolm, and Neil Plotkin, Alex Kanevsky (San Francisco: Dolby Chadwick Gallery, 2015.) “Les 50 Painters les Plus Cités,” Miroir de L’Art 55, 2014. “People and Their Bodies: Pintura, Alex Kanevsky,” Egoista, Magazine of Art and Literature 51, December 2013. James Chute, “Alex Kanevsky in Residence at Lux Art Institute,” San Diego Union Tribune, June 9, 2013. Allison Malafronte, “Alex Kanevsky at Dolby Chadwick Gallery,” Fine Art Connoisseur, February 2013. Jacques Desage, “Alex Kanevsky,” Miroir de L’Art 45, 2013. BM, “Alex Kanevsky Doppio Sogno,”Artinmostra, December 4, 2012. Alex Kanevsky: Contemporary Painter Series (China: Tianjin Yangliuqing Fine Arts Press, 2012). Frédéric Charles Baitinger, “Alex Kanevsky, Le Hasard Manipulé,” Artension, May/June 2011. Peter Selz, “Alex Kanevsky: Dolby Chadwick Gallery,” Art in America, January 2011. Ilaria Bignotti, Corpi Esposti (Milan: Barbara Frigerio Gallery, 2011). Kenneth Baker, “Kanevsky at Dolby,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 23, 2010. Versal 7 (Amsterdam), 2009, cover and picture essay. Mario Naves, “Alex Kanevsky: Proserpine,” City Arts, New York, May 2009. Alexandra Bourré, “Alex Kanevsky”, Vernissages, France, January 2009. “Alex Kanevsky: 13 Paintings,” Guernica, Magazine of Art & Politics, January 2009. Carina Chocano, “Synecdoche, NY,” Los Angeles Times, September 2008. Kenneth Baker, “Kanevsky in His Stride,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 10, 2008. Peter Campion, “Painterly Painting: The Next Level” (CA: The Art Museum of Los Gatos, 2008). Al Gury, Alla Prima Painting: A Contemporary Guide to Traditional Direct Painting (New York: Watson-Guptill, 2008).

David Miklos, La Hermana Falsa (Mexico: Tusquets Editores, 2008), book cover, illustrated. Valerie Gladstone, “Alex Kanevsky: J.Cacciola Gallery,” ARTnews, September 2007. Holly Myers, “Considering Affairs of the Heart,” Los Angeles Times, March 9, 2007. Sharon Mizota, “Alex Kanevsky’s Paintings,” San Francisco Weekly, December 28, 2005. Mario Neves, “Alex Kanevsky,” The New York Observer, May 30, 2005. Tyler Benedict, “Figura” (Montreal: Galleries de Bellefeuille, 2005). Victoria Donohoe, “Painter Takes Cues from Camera,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 28, 2004. New American Paintings 45, May 2003. Tom Csaszar, “Observation of Time and Lived Moments: Paintings of Alex Kanevsky” (New York: J. Cacciola Gallery, 2003). Robert Flynn Johnson, “Love Affair with Paint” (San Francisco: Dolby Chadwick Gallery, 2003). Edward J. Sozanski, “Raking Light,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 26, 2000. New American Paintings 27, May 2000, cover, illustrated. Catherine Quillman, “Alex Kanevsky,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 21, 1999. Victoria Donohoe, “Alex Kanevsky,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 17, 1999. Joshua Meyer, “Alex Kanevsky,” Art New England, April 5, 1999. Gerard Brown, “Fast, Smeared, and Out of Control,” Philadelphia Weekly, April 29, 1998. John Chambless, “Alex Kanevsky,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 14, 1997. Judith E. Stein, “Ars Longa, and It Keeps Changing,” Pew Fellowships in the Arts Catalog for Awardees, 1997. Tom Csaszar, “Alex Kanevsky: Rosenfeld Gallery,” New Art Examiner, May 1995. AWARDS 2012 L ux Art Institute, art residency, Encinitas, CA 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, painting fellowship 2007 Eagle Hill Foundation, Steuben, ME, painting residency

2006 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, painting fellowship 2004 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, painting fellowship 2003 F rantz and Virginia Bader Fund, painting grant Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ireland, residency fellowship New American Paintings, Number 45, May 2003 2002 P ennsylvania Council on the Arts, painting fellowship 2000 New American Paintings, Number 27 cover, May 2000 1999 New American Paintings, Open Studio Competition 1997 P ew Fellowship in the Arts, painting fellowship 1994 Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT, painting fellowship 1993 Pennsylvania Governor’s Award for Painting Mary Townsend & William Clarke Mason Memorial Prize in Sculpture 1992 William Emlen Cresson Memorial Travel Scholarship Mabel Wilson Woodrow Memorial Award Pearson Memorial Prize for Painting TEACHING 2002–17 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Adjunct Painting Instructor 2005 Governor’s Institutes on the Arts, Castleton, VT, Visiting artist 2004 Painting and Photography through the Contemporary Eye, Dobbiaco, Italy, Artist in Residence University of Delaware, Newark, DE, Visiting Artist/Critic 2000–03 Governor’s Institutes on the Arts, Castleton, VT, Painting Teacher

This catalogue has been published on the occasion of the exhibition “Alex Kanevsky: Postcards from a Closet” organized by Hollis Taggart, New York, and presented from March 17–April 16, 2022. All Artwork © Alex Kanevsky Essay © Jason Rosenfeld ISBN: 978-1-7378463-5-2 Publication © 2022 Hollis Taggart All rights reserved. Reproduction of contents prohibited. Frontispiece: Artist’s studio, 2021. Photography by Kara Spellman Hollis Taggart 521 West 26th Street 1st Floor New York, NY 10001 Tel 212 628 4000 Fax 212 570 5786 www.hollistaggart.com Catalogue production: Kara Spellman Copyediting: Jessie Sentivan Design: McCall Associates, New York Printing: Point B Solutions, Minneapolis Photography: John W. Hession, New Hampshire Image Credits: Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY (fig. 5); © Tate, Photo: Tate (fig. 1)

Edition of 500