Already known for planting her cut-out shapes onto a dense matte black ground, which she has characterized as ‘non-space,’ for this show, Kent challenges viewers straight off with a plunge into a black field already seemingly torn away to reveal both apparent voids alongside ‘cut-out’ figures in white that echo the more prominently placed pigmented shapes, and—further confusing her ‘non-space’—shallow, quasi-illusionistic depths in which undulant and organic segmented forms in gauzy charcoal-grays seemed to emerge from behind the deep-black torn-out surround like protozoa or plant stalks, only to sink again behind interior black shards and stalactites.
Read MoreKate Barbee has piqued the interest of the art world with her dynamic depictions of fragmented female bodies in vivid domestic tableaux. Few artists can meld as many painting styles and art historical references as fluidly as Barbee does because few artists have the assuredness to paint as courageously.
Read MoreNew York-based Israeli artist Nir Hod has obviously been bitten by the serpent. A quick search for this term yields only medical treatments and quotes from the Christian bible, no mentions of any colloquial phrases, which is strange because in his 1992 book Liber Kaos, Peter Carroll writes that “The awakening of the octarine power is sometimes known as ‘being bitten by the serpent.’”
Read MoreFor her first solo show at Kohn Gallery, Chicago-based artist Caroline Kent hung eight of her oversize acrylic paintings around the venue’s main and commensurately scaled space. The thin unstretched canvases, anchored to the wall by their top edges, suggested an affinity with banners or tapestries, pliant and portable heralds even though their compositions were long since fixed.
Read MoreA new exhibition of paintings by Kate Barbee abandons the precious sanctity of the canvas. In rosy paintings, figures swirl and mingle, limbs jut out at impossible angles. Just as her figures are deconstructed in a pseudo-Cubist style, her paintings too are cut apart and then stitched back together.
Read MoreLos Angeles based artist Kate Barbee is not afraid to unabashedly explore the intimate escapism associated with the trials and tribulations of young adulthood in her work. Her vivid large-scale paintings play with an expansive color palette that delineate abstract dreamy figures amidst the presence of mixed media like waxes, scraps of quilts, and other textiles.
Read MoreShe lies on the ground, turns her body towards the canvas that will eventually become a painting full of colour, and starts creating. Dallas-born painter Kate Barbee is carried away by feeling, and needs space to express emotions that can sometimes be difficult to manage. Her latest series focuses on self-portraiture - a necessity during lockdown. I
Read MoreAt Kohn Gallery in Hollywood, Caroline Kent’s abstract shapes dance above matte black backgrounds. In each painting, made at a large and consistent scale, geometric forms mingle and position across the canvas. Like the cut paper works of Matisse — Kent also begins her process with cut paper to sketch out her forms — Kent’s shapes have precise and clean edges, while smaller details, like a swarm of squiggles, float on the black ground to create subtle annotations, almost like punctuation.
Read MoreCreating colorful narratives about erotic encounters from needle and thread, Sophia Narrett makes fascinating embroidered artworks that are fueled by love and desire. Trained as a painter, the Brooklyn-based artist began working with yarn by chance while constructing a sculpture during her undergrad studies at Brown University. Further experimenting with thread to stitch some drawings, she brilliantly discovered a way to employ embroidery to simulate figurative paintings. By the time she received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2014, she was imaginatively making meaningful art with her new medium, which quickly caught the attention of critics, curators, and collectors.
Read MoreChiffon Thomas is an interdisciplinary artist whose works range from mixed-media painting and collage to drawing and sculpture. The Chicago native, who identifies as a non-binary queer person with a strong religious upbringing, says their meaningful works "examine the difficulties faced by defining one's identity in contemporary society."
Read MoreIlana Savdie was raised in Barranquilla, Colombia and is now based in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2018 and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008.
Read MoreIn her vibrant embroidered works, Sophia Narrett paints with thread, deftly creating detailed figurative scenes tinged with fantasy, desire, and eroticism.
Her tapestries take center stage this month in “Soul Kiss,” the New York artist’s first solo show at Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles. Her layered thread designs, almost Baroque in their complexity, present a fever dream of feminine sexuality, with women in ecstasy reveling in their freedom.
Read MoreWhen Sophia Narrett traded in her paint tubes for embroidery thread, she never looked back. The switch happened while the New York artist was completing an MFA in painting at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design and found herself experimenting with thread. “I fell in love with the process right from the start,” she says. The medium has certainly worked for her: Last year, Narrett was named the winner of Galerie’s Emerging Artist Award and received the $10,000 prize by Galerie’s editors and a jury of art-world luminaries, who reviewed over 400 artist portfolios.
Read MoreEven as a child, Caroline Kent was immersed in the language of abstraction. The Chicago-based artist — whose large-scale black canvases evoke cosmic unknowns — grew up alongside her identical twin sister, Christine Leventhal, with whom she shared special methods of communication. Their conversations can still be so elliptical and condensed that they perplex others.
Read MoreSophia Narrett’s are not your typical tapestries. First of all, they’re not tapestries; the textile artist does not weave, but embroider, layering thread upon stitch to create shapes and shades that coalesce into a dazzling narrative. Secondly, there’s the subject matter—highly erotic vignettes that would make artisans of the historic Parisian tapestry house Gobelins clutch their pearls.
Read MoreART: Caroline Kent: A Sudden Appearance of the Sun and Sophia Narrett: Soul Kiss at Kohn Gallery. Interested in a reevaluation of abstract painting, Kent’s practice is founded on notions of language and textual translation.
Read MoreSophia Narrett was a painter before she began “drawing with thread,” as she told Hyperallergic. Dense with figurative detail, her embroidered bas-reliefs weave together not only fabrics but also various daydream-like narrative threads.
Read MoreOur identities are endlessly complicated — a strange mix of our own personal insecurities and ambitions, combined with the pressures of a society projecting its insecurities and ambitions onto us. Especially in a year with little distraction, we've been forced to sit with ourselves in months-long isolation, reflecting on who we are, what we've been and ways we can possibly adapt moving forward.
Read MoreAt Los Angeles’s Kohn Gallery, a group show titled Myselves comprises work by 25 different artists working in varying mediums. The show is emphatically diverse in this way, with work by painters like Loie Hollowell and Amoako Boafo on view with photography by Wolfgang Tillmans, alongside mixed media works by Chiffon Thomas and Jagdeep Raina. The show’s curator, Joshua Friedman, wanted to explore how different mediums can communicate ideas about racial, gender, and national identities, and how these come to be constructed.
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