• BRIAN KAPERNEKAS: deadfall
  • September 05 - October 04, 2008
  • Opening Reception: Friday, September 05 (7-10PM)

  • 65GRAND is pleased to present Brian Kapernekas in his first solo exhibition with the gallery. These new works feature paintings and painted sculptural objects that, despite their deliberately understated nature, transfix viewers with their intensity of purpose.

  • Constructions literally made from the deadfall found in Kapernekas' yard include sundry folk objects, such as the bundle of wood in Conjuror, and the twig broom in Dusted. The humble materials that make up these quotidian objects are transformed into uncanny sculptural pieces after being art-kissed by brilliant, rainbow colored coats of enamel.

  • Although equally comfortable crafting representational and abstract paintings, such as Strike versus Fog, all of Kapernekas's cache of forms evoke a simple poetry; a sunset, a hammer and nail, snowflakes falling on a winters night. His ribbed, smeared, and dalloped painterly brushstrokes, made over chiefly natural linen surfaces, amplify the intuitive content of his work.

  • In contrast to a typically solipsistic studio practice, Kapernekas maintains an excellent website (kapernekas.com) that catalogs his completed bodies of work alongside his ongoing projects and studio experimentations. Contextualizing his art practice, it also advances what, in his own words, is a mining of the space where the "arbitrary and the authoritative co-exist." In that space, the beguiling hyperbole of the fairy tale is telescoped down to the all too human props and places contained therein, permitting their mysterious, and often observational narrative to co-exist happily ever within his work.

  • Brian Kapernekas received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and his MFA from University of Illinois at Chicago, both in painting. A 2004 Artadia award recipient, he's exhibited in Chicago previously at Vonzweck in 2005 and COMA in 2006 and 2007, among others.