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Kim Dorland
Ghosts of You and Me
Opening May 2, 2013
On View Through June 8
520 West 24th Street
Oil and acrylic on jute over wood panel / 96 x 72 in.
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Mike Weiss Gallery is pleased to present Canadian artist Kim Dorland's
third solo exhibition at the gallery, a tour-de-force of large-scale
oil works on canvas that transport us to a place of heightened
psychological portent as they transfix us with an undeniably sensual
physicality. Known for his thick impasto marks
and near-sculptural effect, Dorland's newest body of work amps up
recent color palettes, returning to fluorescent oranges and penetrating,
acrid greens, liberating their application into a looser expression of
drips and washes. The title, Ghosts of You and Me, besides being a Leonard Cohen lyric and woeful personal reflection,
alludes to the at-times otherworldly glow that now grips his subjects:
lone drunks and sleepwalking dreamers, ghostly clearings in dark
forests, and glimpses of the artist so engulfed in his own creative act
that we, as viewers, seem to hover at their perimeter.
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Kim Dorland / Dripping Dream / 2013 / Oil and acrylic on jute over wood panel / 72 x 96 in.
No
matter how visionary the subject matter, it is a newly evolved graphic
and color sensibility that drives this body of work, via hyper-saturated
hues and relentless, ever-variegated blacks. Continuously
influenced by historical Canadian landscape painters The Group of Seven,
Dorland's outdoor scenes venture into darker, more psychological
realms, with interiors and single portraits that bring to mind the
scumbled figures of Francis Bacon and Eugène Leroy. A
prolific and energetic worker, Dorland typically keeps numerous
paintings measuring 6 by 8 feet cooking at once in his studio, producing
clusters of enigmatic narratives and loose-lying resemblances. As a
result, these seemingly disparate bodies of work form subtle, unlikely
connections through their shared material concerns, tangential colors,
and ghostly parallels.
Kim Dorland / The Painter in His Canoe / 2013 / Oil and acrylic on jute over wood / 72 x 96 in.
The mysterious death of legendary Canadian painter Tom Thomson is the chilling subtext of The Painter in His Canoe, told by Dorland in a narrative of stark yet bilious greens and blacks, while in The End, epiphanic sun-flares of acrid yellow and alizarin burst through a dark stand of trees, evoking Jay deFeo's The Rose in composition. Three Arms depicts
the artist's wife Lori, a recurring muse for Dorland, this time
emblazoned with neon color fields and the residual optic ghosting of one
of her limbs. Finally, in Zombies (The Year That Was),
we witness glowing silhouetted figures slouching through wooded
territory as if toward some unseen rite, nodding to the ubiquitous
impact of Canadian myth and geography, while perfectly distilling the artist's idiosyncratic mix of bad-boy youth culture and studio craftsmanship.
Kim Dorland / The End / 2013 / Oil on linen / 72 x 96 in.
In early years, Dorland's imagery could be found dominated by
disaffected youth, death-metal graffiti etched into birch-tree trunks,
taxidermy animals, and ominously bare forests. Now, married with two
sons, we find the artist's canvases subtly declaring a love for paint
itself, with an Op-Art palette and luscious drippings - at times as
loose as Morris Louis - that belie a lurking psychological gravitas. Ghosts of You and Me
transcribes Dorland's successful transition to another level, one of
enduring scale and bravura, and of subsuming raw energy into an offbeat
maturity.
Kim Dorland / Zombies (The Year That Was) / 2013 / Oil and acrylic on jute / 72 x 96 in.
Kim Dorland (b. 1974 in Wainwright, Alberta) lives and works in
Toronto, Ontario, and has shown extensively around the world. His work
is included in prominent public and private collections including the
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, The Musée d'art Contemporain de Montréal,
the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, the Blanton Museum of Art at The
University of Texas, the Eileen S. Kaminsky Family Foundation in New
Jersey, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts,
the Neumann Family Collection in New York, the Richard Massey
Foundation in New York, the Royal Bank of Canada, the Sander Collection
in Berlin, and The Oppenheimer Collection at the Nerman Museum of
Contemporary Art in Kansas City, MO.
For questions or more information, please contact Anna Ortt, Director, at anna@mikeweissgallery.com.
Mike Weiss Gallery
520 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011
Tel: 212-691-6899
Hours: Tues-Sat 10am to 6pm
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