New Spring 2011, oil on canvas, 48×72 in., 122×183 cm.
For Immediate Release
KENT WILLIAMS: CONVERGENCE
Hosted by Alex O’Loughlin
Exhibition Dates: May 21 – June 18, 2011
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 21, 8-11pm
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 12 – 6pm
Merry Karnowsky Gallery
170 S. La Brea Avenue (in the ART 170 Building)
Los Angeles, CA 90036
Phone: (323) 933-4408
Web: www.mkgallery.com
Download Press Release PDF
Merry Karnowsky Gallery is proud to present Convergence, a solo exhibition by artist Kent Williams.
When fighting is no longer an option, one surrenders, come what may. One must create a connective trust with him or herself alone and plunge hand-in-hand into an unknown so vast, any and everything is possible. It is a trust that is at once both a finale and an introduction.
In his solo exhibition of paintings and drawings, Convergence, Kent Williams promises that to surrender is not necessarily to give up, and he rewards those who are either hopeless enough, or courageous enough, to submit with a private and sinking comfort inside the eye of the storm. The reassurance he offers is that there is a bridge between the before and after, and it is here, and here is now.
Whether wrapped, or rapt, in a maelstrom of heritage and progress only familiar in dreams, or surviving a conflict only known to lovers, Williams’ characters make no apologies for finding themselves in the right here, right now. While others turn away in protective isolation, some figures boldly lock our eyes in order to challenge us, as if to ask, “What choice did I have?” Williams sends each soul adrift amid future artifacts to confront, alone, the looming threat of history.
With his works, Williams invites a strange temptation to envy the figures inside. The wonders of the then and the caverns of the now swirl manically around them, and yet one may find little, if any, comfort in the notion that this too shall pass. Perhaps alone, we are in this together, longing for this now to last.
In Kent Williams’ upcoming book Eklektikos, art critic Peter Frank explains, “To view a Kent Williams painting is to believe yourself in it – or, more precisely, to believe yourself in it and out of (if near) it at the same time, suspended between levels of reality just as the paintings’ subjects clearly are. These are not pictures to look at from a safe remove, but conditions – physical conditions, spatial conditions, mental conditions, emotional conditions, human conditions. And these conditions affect all who witness them, whether in them or before them. They have to: they speak to us of us, and must do so about us, not merely at us.”
For more information: Please contact Merry Karnowsky at mkgallery@att.net or 323.933.4408
Press Contact: Jessica O’Dowd jessica@mkgallery.com