Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery

Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery opens its fall season with a front-gallery show of David Scanavino’s drawings. The room will be enveloped by a grid of works on archival colored papers, each the same size. These drawings reflect Scanavino’s daily process of generating iconographic forms that border on abstraction. The wax-crayon works are made with bold colors and lines, reducing natural forms – birds, trees, flowers – into silhouettes and shapes. Scanavino’s use of crayon on construction paper evokes childhood creativity, a theme woven throughout his oeuvre over the past 15 years. This immersive installation offers a close look into Scanavino’s studio, and shows his dedication to experimental mark-making and color. The show’s focus on drawing reveals how he distills images into forms, paving the way for his larger paintings and sculptural installations. David Scanavino has created major installations in recent years at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT; the Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis, MO; and the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University in Houston, TX. He is an associate professor at the Rhode Island School of Design and lives and works in Providence, RI. This is his fifth solo show with the gallery.

Klaus von Nichtssagend is pleased to announce Rücken–, Kemar Keanu Wynter’s third solo exhibition opening on Friday, September 6, from 6-8pm. The exhibition delves into the profound emotional depth of Wynter’s work, revealing his sentimental approach to color field painting. The artist charts the sublime through a masterful technique that reconfigures one’s perception of space, texture, and flavor into mutable and tactile sensations, offering a full-body immersion. Wynter’s alchemical process is deeply rooted in chemistry and memory. Born to a family of Jamaican immigrants who settled in Brooklyn, New York, Wynter came of age in a household where love and strong bonds manifested through gatherings and home-cooked meals. Guided by these heartfelt reflections, Wynter developed an artistic style he dubs a “visual Patois,” a unique language through which he can triangulate himself between the Caribbean, New York, and the innumerable geographies, cultures, and cuisines he has yet encountered. Artworks become totems of Wynter’s unique perspective, marking his ability to freeze time and reinterpret his experiences of intimacy and indulgence through sensual hues and feverish gestures. Every tantalizing note he consumes, he transforms into jovial recollections. Like an esteemed gourmand, Wynter contorts, diffuses, and performs pigment to map a haptic sensibility one experiences through taste and ambiance. Rücken– is the latest result of Wynter’s ever-evolving articulation of a visual Patois. Plucked from the full term Rückenfigur, a nineteenth-century art motif popularized by German Romanticists, famously employed in Caspar David Friedrich’s seminal painting Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog (1818). Rückenfigur translates to “figure from the back.” It’s a ubiquitous compositional device that evokes longing and invites viewers to complete the scene by stepping into the faceless figure’s role, embracing nature’s grandeur and power. In Wynter’s Rücken–, we are not just viewers but active participants in his religious entanglements with romance through the lens of synesthesia and cartography. Each large-scale painting transcribes feelings of love, abundance, and pleasure into an angelic mirage of colors that blur into one another across pulsating surfaces. In this visual dance, Wynter compels our eyes to scan voraciously. Each scene holds ragmented notes that coalesce into one body, recording dishes and atmospheres shared with his loves arading as wafting shifts in primal, illusive, and untranslatable speech. In Knead Bee (Marionberry Cheesecake Ice Cream), 2024, lusty pastels disperse like spotty cloud formulations that foreshadow a lofty journey. Emerging from a late-night ice cream rendezvous after having seen L’Rain perform at Bowery Ballroom, the artist creates a blushing nude that dominates the canvas. Splotches of diluted oranges and mustard ochres emerge from the edges. Blending with rose tones–bursts of mint twist in this demure hue while a bioluminescent lavender curves inward from the left field. He prepares his paintings on sheets of a polyester microfiber called Evolon, laying them on the ground before he applies acrylic to the heavily wetted surface. Wynter works into the surface repeatedly until the ideal image takes form. The artist hangs each painting untamed by borders, with the back side facing us, revealing pigment that has shifted and migrated through the porous surface, resulting in weathered and wrinkled striations that fawn a darker patina. The colors we see carry a temperance to them, repositioning our gluttonous appetite into a tender modality that lingers in the folds of our skin long after the moment has passed. When viewing these conspicuous paintings, our silhouette molds into its frame, transporting our bodies into an experience the artist has carefully illustrated for us. — Shameekia Shantel Johnson, 2024

Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery presents a new solo exhibition of Barry Stone’s photographic work based on his ongoing web project Porch Swing Orchestra, which explores the interplay between images, music, and field recordings. The framed photographs, wall vinyls, and sound recordings included in this exhibition provide a window into the project’s history. Since 2018, Stone has published images paired with sound on porchswingorchestra.org. Each post consists of an audio field recording of Stone’s guitar melodies plus ambient sounds (conversations of passersby, the rattle of air conditioners, birdsong, sirens of cicadas) and a photograph taken at the time and place of the recording. The photographs are often “databent,” which involves hacking the code that makes up digital images to glitch the picture. In the gallery space, large databent images have been printed as vinyls and adhered directly to the wall, providing a layered backdrop for nine framed works. Sounds collaged from the original recordings play on speakers in the gallery. During the show, a special edition, 12-inch LP of the original PSO sound pieces will be available at the gallery. In addition, the gallery will make a weekly post of new PSO pieces on the website.

Holly Coulis’s upcoming solo show at Klaus Gallery, titled Rubber Band, will feature glowing new explorations of color and line, two areas in which Coulis has fiercely pushed her work over the past 20 years. This show, her fifth with the gallery, will open May 17, 2024 and will run through June 21. Outlines serve as unreliable guides in Coulis’s new work. Here, long, colorfully painted strokes adopt a cursive quality, departing from the still life representations they have previously delineated. Squiggles and loops press against each other, moving mischievously through broader fields of layered chromatic brushstrokes. At times, these lines rush like rivulets across the canvas, while elsewhere they form an array of dynamically curving shapes within confined areas. The lines prove unpredictable, veering around hairpin curves and playfully wobbling after crafting graceful arcs. Following their trajectory leads us on detours that challenge our initial perceptions. Glimpses of familiar silhouettes—vases, bowls, fruits—vanish as swiftly as they materialize, as if the line refuses to complete the thought, instead eagerly moving on to the next loop, curl, or helix. Holly Coulis (b. 1968, Toronto, Ontario) lives and works in Athens, Georgia. She holds an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, Artforum, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, and Hyperallergic among others. The Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas and Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Kansas include Coulis’s work in their permanent collections.