Michael Kohn Gallery is delighted to announce three solo presentations of paintings by artists Lita Albuquerque, Nir Hod, and Mark Innerst at Expo Chicago 2024.
Inspired by nature and Earth’s place in the grander universe, Light and Space artist Lita Albuquerque’s (b. 1946) body of work interweaves photography, film, performance, painting, and sculpture into a vibrant synthesis of personal and cosmic mythologies. In her presentation at Expo Chicago, Albuquerque revisits her celebrated Auric Field series. In several new canvases varying in scale, hypnotizing golden orbs are set against a minimal background of dark blue pigment. “I started using blue as a way of uniting earth and sky,” says Albuquerque. “From the beginning of my practice, the color blue was also inspired by the color of the Mediterranean where I grew up, and the deep history of cosmology of that region. Since then, using the color blue has been a fascination. To quote Goethe: ‘We love to contemplate blue, not because it comes towards us, but because it draws us after it.’"
Nir Hod’s (b.1970) artistic practice draws upon personal memory and traumatic historical events to elicit subtle tensions between the viewer’s expectations and the material reality of the painting surface. In his most recent series, 100 Years Is Not Enough, Hod appropriates and synthesizes Claude Monet’s water lily iconography into dream-like interpretations of flora and various bodies of water. These new works present a masterful play between the profoundly illusionistic depth of the chromed, mirror-like surface. The viewer and their surroundings are reflected, and the physical substance of the painting, evidenced by the thick impastoed brushstrokes, evoke shimmering sunlight on water. The effect has an extraordinary impact precisely because of the two competing, yet completely compatible, major shifts in painterly perspective.
Mark Innerst (b. 1957) broke into the New York art scene in the early 1980s as part of the Pictures Generation of artists who employed widely varied images as source material culled from the expanding media of the pre-digital age. His small-scale oils on canvas in hand-made frames showcase a continuous conceptual investigation into thematic genres of traditional painting. Towering buildings of cityscapes are depicted as bejeweled giants which line the lonely canyon of an urban avenue. Elsewhere, Innerst produces his own version of a Dutch church interior with a blue-toned study of the grand lobby of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, replete with visitors filling the vast space.
