In the painting Black Globe, a dark orb stands on a cluttered desk. Instead of depicting the mass of land and water that a globe represents, the sphere is abstracted as a circle—a portrait of shapes and contours, positives and negatives, pale forms shifting on a black surface.

Kimmerich is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition with David Korty, a selection of paintings which examine the pages of books, the compositions of newspapers and the borders of photographs.

Earlier in the decade, Korty’s work emerged with depictions of his hometown of Los Angeles. These paintings are void of hard edges, favoring the ambiguity of watercolors and dripping paints to portray obscured high-rises of the city. Over the past ten years, the surfaces of Korty’s canvases have slowly transformed from such opaque landscapes into concentrated compositions. Lines come into focus and white washed pastels turn dark and bold. The vast exteriors are narrowed until we no longer see a rolling mountain range or the staggering skyline of a metropolis, but instead a person, a book, or the leaf of a page. It is as if Korty has slowly rotated the focus ring of the camera lens over the duration of his entire career, carefully rendering his images sharper.

The result is a body of work which considers various patterns and shapes embedded in the ephemera of the everyday. The text of a newspaper appears as a pattern of triangles, circles and squares as opposed to letters or graphemes. The frame of a face consists of curves and shapes—just as the cover of book or the frame of a house. The spots of a leopard that scatter over its matte white coat are no different than the shapes and forms of Black Globe floating on a black sea.

As Korty transcribes letters into shapes and lines, the newspapers no longer inform but take form. Geometry becomes a metonym for language, rendering content indecipherable. Korty’s paintings oscillate between these abstractions and their identifiable subjects—clusters of paper, pages, and photographs. What results is a sophisticated dialogue between the non-objective and the representational, a way of seeing the surrounding world paralleled with the will to reinvent it.

David Korty was born in 1971 in San Francisco, CA. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and the University of California.

Recent participation in group exhibitions include The Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, Charlottenburg Exhibition Hall, Copenhagen, DK, Kunstmuseum Basel, CH, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel, CH, Kunsthalle Basel, CH and Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, CA.

The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.