Kimmerich is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition with the first solo show of Ivan Morley in New York City.

Morley’s practice explores both conventional and non-traditional techniques to investigate painting both as a genre and as a medium. These technical explorations range from the basics of creating batik to applying oil and acrylic paint on unconventional supports, such as leather or tempered glass. Most remarkably, his blending of materials, textures and patterns not only reunites ancient, or half-forgotten forgotten folk techniques (glass painting, embroidery) with decidedly unusual modern substances (KY Jelly, One Shot lettering paint), but also serves as various investigative means to reach the goals he sets himself each time he starts a new painting.

His set objectives usually start with simple, compositional questions, the process determining the formal aspects and the sometime irregular shape of the canvases, as in Don, George, Diane (2008). Altering the conventional dimension of painting is but one of the many means Morley has used to get around the strictly formalist questions of the Modernist era or the grandiose narratives of Postmodernism, together with the amalgamation of different textures and the positing of abstract and figurative tropes within a single artwork.

The historical vantage point offered to the painter in the first decades of the 21st century allows Morley to make free use of a visual vocabulary that includes figurative elements taken from the vernacular, remembrance of artworks passed, distortions of overheard snippets of conversation and ancient elements of visual culture passed from generation to generation to the point of utmost distortion.

Such a complex and painstaking process results in hybrid paintings of various techniques as well as formal elements normally not associated with each other but which miraculously come together to create their own reality.

Ivan Morley was born in Burbank, CA in 1966. He was educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (B.F.A, 1989) and Art Center College of Design (M.F.A, 2000). Morley has exhibited widely in Europe and in the United States, and his work is in the collections of MOCA (Los Angeles) and K21 (Düsseldorf). He lives and works in Los Angeles.