Trust What Emerges
SHERRY LEEDY CONTEMPORARY
April 4 - May 24, 2025
JERRY KUNKEL: Trust What Emerges
Jerry Kunkel’s paintings speak to our individual appetite for self-reflection, born of a collective and universal desire to comprehend, both physically and emotionally, the world around us. Weaving narratives in a poetic or humorous fashion, he sometimes constructed the work with no apparent end in sight, allowing the consequent juxtapositions of images to create a story. His work superimposes original and found imagery with the addition of text as an attitudinal descriptor, or an extra, content-specific image. In addition, the frequent incorporation of the illusion of plywood or other non-precious surfaces adds the element of the everyday and has pervaded his work for years.
Jerry was interested in our momentary reaction to everyday stimuli, that moment that summons a private response – a response that we may not feel compelled to share for a variety of reasons; perhaps because it doesn’t seem important, that our response is not fully formed, or we simply don’t care to think about why we really don’t care. In the end, whatever it is, he would say “trust what emerges and embrace uncertainty.”
BIOGRAPHY
Jerry Kunkel (1944-2023) was a lifelong collector known for his paintings loaded with images that trigger our cultural memory and collective consciousness, all mined from his collections. He considered the process of collecting to be transformative and, lucky for us, his paintings make that transformation visible for us to see.
Jerry began teaching at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1969. He was Chair of the Department of Art and Art History (UCB) from 1978 –1993 and Interim Director of the Film Studies Program from 1993-95, retiring as emeritus professor of Fine Arts in 2006. He relocated to Lawrence, KS where he maintained an active studio practice until his death in 2023 at the age of 78.
When Kunkel moved his studio from Colorado to Lawrence, he was faced quite literally with unpacking his life. This began a long process of attempting to unpack imagery, unravel it, unlayer it, isolate it, and spread it out. Resonating with references to pop culture, everyday activities, the unexplained curious twist, the symbolic and the everyday, Kunkel’s paintings spread out imagery, pattern, and text, luxuriously revealing unexpected stories intertwined with nuance and meaning. Jerry wanted us to “remember everything and nothing at once, to cross-reference the past and the present, to be self-reflective, to consider the mundane and the sublime in a single breath, to reconsider our cultural conventions, to acknowledge our excesses, and to juxtapose what we believe to be true with what we may still need to learn.”
Jerry Kunkel was awarded a solo exhibition at the Denver Art Museum in 1974 and exhibited nationally in such venues as the Chicago Art Institute, IL, San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts, CA, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, NY, and numerous others. Jerry Kunkel’s paintings are held in the public collections of the Denver Art Museum, CO; Anderson Ranch Arts Center, CO; Southern Illinois University Carbondale, IL; Kirkland Museum, Denver, CO; Sun Valley Center for the Arts and Humanities, ID; Aurora Campus Library, Denver, CO; Kaiser Permanente; Amoco, Inc; Anaconda Corporation; and others including numerous private collections.
The Great Depression 2004
x 50”
A Place To Be
For RM 2016 Oil on canvas 22” x 21”
Ecstasy 2012 Oil on canvas 27” x 40.5”
Forever 2012
Oil on canvas
27” x 40.5”
Unremarkable
Side Effects 2012 Oil on canvas
25” x 27”
A Good Man is Hard (to Find)
Oil on canvas 40” x 50”
Flower Card
on canvas 32” x 26”
Life (Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre)
2011 Oil on canvas
29” x 36”
Profile (w. vertigo) 2018 Oil on canvas 22” x 20”
Arousal 2011 Oil on canvas
46” x 36”
Still Life with Bored Venus, Adonis, and Wood Slab
Oil on canvas 46” x 36”
Clutch Purse #5 2004 Oil on canvas
22” x 24”
Three Ships 2016
Oil on canvas
37.5” x 36”
Never Enough, Frederic Edwin Church 2010
Oil on canvas
42” x 59.5”
Sunday Morning (Walk) 2005 Oil on canvas 60” x 60”
