Jon Kessler emerged in the early 1980s with mixed-media wall constructions that incorporated readymades and machine-driven movement, works that juxtaposed discrete zones of figuration against an armature and islands of abstraction, balanced biomorphic and geometric forms, and embraced color, pattern, and decoration.
We swam below the surface of a gentle rolling current off the island of Grand Bahama, carrying bright cartons of small coral fragments, fingers of elkhorn coral, and cookie-sized disks of even smaller coral shards that had begun to fuse together.
Liva Isakson Lundin, who was educated in Stockholm and currently works in New York City, creates environments that respond to their sites with great sensitivity. Her installations and sculptures are inspired by Modernism’s century-long legacy, but their formalism is invested with a searching energy and emotional resonance that are thoroughly contemporary.
Conceptual artist Florian Slotawa does not make his work from scratch. Instead, he assembles his sculptures and installations from what already exists, rearranging and recontextualizing found material with a keen sense of form and color.
Irina Kirchuk’s works walk a fine line between abstraction and figuration. The Argentinian artist, who lives and works in Buenos Aires, observes the urban landscape and recovers objects from it, collecting and classifying them, exploring what she calls “their material obsolescence and mean functionality.”
A life is not a timeline. The supposed linear movement, building one moment adjacent to another, is a false construct. Adding another dimension gives a planar view of bright moments, scattered like diamonds on a field of velvet.
