Kimmerich is pleased to announce David Korty’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. In the nine new paintings that comprise the exhibition, Korty’s attention turns again to architecture and landscape, a subject taken up in the earlier depictions of his hometown, Los Angeles. Once favoring the ambiguity of watercolors and dripping paints to portray obscure high-rises of the city, Korty’s work has shifted over the past 10 years into concentrated compositions, echoing Dadist collage, Russian Constructivism and the Bauhaus in its graphic linearity and conservative chromatic scale.

In these new works Korty refers to downtown Vancouver Canada, nicknamed “City of Glass” for the postmodern glass buildings that line the waterfront. The structures reflective surfaces abstract and distort reflections of their surroundings, inhibiting one’s ability to see them clearly. Korty frames and isolates the scene and space of the image through photographs shot on site. The photograph is taken of a mirror placed in front of the artist, in order to capture the scene behind him. With a cinematic quality, the paintings depict several related moments, moving in and out of the frame, with varying degrees of clarity, sometimes dissolving entirely into intricate, geometric patterns. The effect is what critic Christopher Miles calls Korty’s “turn to imagery that offers a more ubrupt confrontation with the banal”.

David Korty’s practice examines everyday objects and experience, depicting them as both recognizable images as well as a series of complex abstractions. The making process is central to Korty’s finished works, and begins with documenting the scenes and objects that consitute the ordinary in his surroundings. This documentation takes the form of photography, drawing and frottage, which are then transferred or collaged onto the painting. These several processes of flattening and mediation become what the artist refers to as a remodeling of the ephemera of the everyday, to elucidate underlying linear structures and patterns. Still alluding to a familiar, historical, everyday imagery, most of the identifiable referents are removed, volume and a clear perspective are rejected, and the images reinterpreted compositions of line, and color. The ‘subjects’ are of the real world, but the understanding of them is muted, transformed and reconstructed.

Born in 1971, David Korty lives and works in Los Angeles.