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Late Holiday
Branden KochNew Paintings
Jason Karolak - Project Room
March 23 - April 14, 2007
Opening Reception: Friday, March 23, 2007, 6-9pm
CHICAGO, IL -- rowlandcontemporary is pleased to present Late Holiday, a new series of paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Branden Koch that explore the temporal relationship between painting and the domestic landscape. In the project space, Chicagoan Jason Karolak presents an installation of drawings and painting that render a dialogue on his artistic practice.
Late Holiday
Inspired by the ruins at Skara Brae in Scotland, a Neolithic site noted for its inhabitants' harnessing of fire into a hearth, Branden Koch paints the ruins of a stillborn present. Time, thick with memory, and illusionistic space, dense with information and multi-dimensional; yet troubled by the feeling of being present, here and now. Bold black abstractions interrupt or obfuscate vaguely defined scenes such as a still-life or the painter's studio. Like columns of smoke ascending from a blaze within, abstraction acts as an indicator of figuration's demise. As viewers, we are certainly witness to a process. These works create a clash of depth perception that eventually forces the eye to stop on its surface; barring further perceptual entry, the black strokes represent history's cataracts. Hindsight of the 20/20 variety is, for Koch, a "deceased surprise," a Late Holiday.
Domineering like Franz Kline's painted gestures yet as self-aware as calligraphy, Koch's strokes are frozen glimpses of artistic action. An Abstract Expressionist at heart with a keen sense of design, Koch's paintings are eruptions; the messy molten mass of the artist's mark solidified into chunks of painted time.
Project Room
Jason Karolak joins us in the project room to exhibit a new collection of drawings that reference his experiments in painting. Karolak creates particular spaces where line, space, and color coalesce. What type of forms live in the artist's mind? How are they lived out on paper? While these physically charged forms exude a unique presence, they are also reflections on the very substance of art making - the artist's gesture, his materials, and the viewer's awareness of how bits and parts relate to a sense of composition.
Branden Koch received his MFA from The Milton Avery Graduate Center for the Arts, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, and his BFA from The Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH. Recent exhibitions include High Energy Constructs, Los Angeles, CA, and The Dick Institute, Scotland, UK. This is his first exhibition with rowlandcontemporary and his first exhibition in Chicago.
Jason Karolak recently completed his MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, and his BFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. He has exhibited with Contemporary Art Projects, Chicago, IL, the Beverly Art Center, Chicago, IL, and Marygrove College, Detroit, MI.
