David Kapp was born and raised in New York and has painted the city since the 1970's. Kapp's paintings extract the dramatic contrasts, harmonies, collisions and forms of urban architecture and movement. Images of traffic, buildings and pedestrians from skewed perspectives have become signature for the artist. Kapp has revisited certain views and streetscapes, yet these same subjects arrive in fresh ways with each new series. His extreme perspectives and dramatic plays of light continually evolve in images that have become tools for conveying the essence of the city, rather than literal portraits of his surroundings.
In his latest body of work, Kapp brings a higher dose of geometry and an electric palette, particularly with collage studies that recall the optimism of Matisse's cut-outs. In his paintings, Kapp applies this same precise cutting to paint, where vertical views of a jagged sky through towering high rises become highly flattened, hard-edge abstractions. In some pieces, the context of the urban environment is barely discernible within complex, fractured geometries. These works are accompanied by more painterly approaches as well, where pedestrians, traffic scenes and crosswalks brim with energy. While the subjects are more recognizable in these paintings, Kapp has pared down the scenes to favor a gridded format with spare grounds. In all of his work, Kapp's focus is always on the light, which he sees of primary importance, the adhesive that binds the image together.
"Intentionality is not the primary component of the creative process," Kapp states. "Experimentation and play are of equal importance. I don't want only results but will achieve results through the process of doing. Failure thus becomes an important part of the creative process. The process itself always indicates a direction of interest. Habit is the biggest enemy of creation. The subject of any painting is not the object: the object is the relationship between parts, forms and colors, bound by natural forces."
David Kapp has received two Awards from The American Academy of Arts and Letters along with a Rosenthal Foundation award. His work is in many public and private collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Academy of Design, and The Mint Museum of Art.
Tony Beauvy is a Los Angeles-based painter who received his M.F.A. from UCLA. The exhibition brings together a series of abstract paintings that Beauvy approaches with an improvisational approach, that involve notions of figuration as well as formal approaches. The large scale of the work creates environments in which viewers are enveloped by fibrous drips of paint over successively layered fields.
For Beauvy, resolution is achieved in the undetermined spaces of his paintings. He engages in scraping, pouring, and sanding which move the paintings toward a balance of refinement and roughness. The sense of abandonment and dissolving within the flowing areas of paint embrace the unknowable, which is where Beauvy sees the paintings reaching their highest potential. This interceding space, where the image dematerializes, yet holds interest has the most possibility and interest for both viewers and the artist.
"My paintings are born out of process and practice, addition and subtraction," the artist states. "I want to push the painting almost to its failure point – the point at which it is exhausted is where I find the most possibility. In my paintings, a sense of place appears and disappears. A constant unearthing of surface creates a geography that is not concrete, rather flexible."