Michael Kohn Gallery is pleased to present a selection of artists that utilize distinctive commands of their materials to address and reinterpret critical modes of representation.
Heidi Hahn’s gestural paintings of the female form explore the changing definitions of public and private selves. Faris Heizer’s works are based on personal observations of contemporary society, with his fluid, figurative paintings delving into the world of the white-collar worker in a range of imagined, capitalist realities charged with intimacy, tension, and bewilderment. Similarly, William Brickel approaches the human figure to examine the coexisting phenomena of the self and the other. Li Hei Di’s paintings contemplate complexities surrounding gender and desire through fluid applications of paint capturing the seductive and ephemeral mating dance that occurs in the anticipation of wanting.
Considering history and home, Ilana Savdie inverts traditional associations of figuration and composition in her electrifying, hot-colored surreal works, posing questions that consider migration, foreignness, and familiarity. In the same vein, Siji Krishnan’s delicate, large-scale rice paper paintings explode the boundaries of material possibility by infusing dreamlike scenarios with playful renderings of memory and belonging related to her upbringing in southern India.
Beyond painting, Alicia Adamerovich’s union of carpentry and surreal imagery studies themes of overwhelm through introspective alien landscapes and sculptures that traverse the subconscious. Chiffon Thomas’ figurative assemblages of found industrial debris interpret feelings of nostalgia, and longing to belong through his lens as a trans and queer artist raised within a strong religious environment.
Rounding out the presentation are works by Shiwen Wang and Hadi Alijani, making their Armory debut. Hadi Alijani synthesizes the visual language of Persian miniatures with an oftentimes ironic and playful edge; brightly composed flora and fauna float in formal, two-dimensional spaces, conveying a lyrical world. Concerned with the limits of representation, the liminal, and the escapist potency of ambience, Shiwen Wang shores themes of genesis and catastrophe, the meditative and the methodological, within her harmonious, insistently textural, and ambiguously formed paintings.
Michael Kohn Gallery’s presentation will facilitate a critically relevant and illuminating dialogue in congruence with their contemporaries and current art viewership.
