RANNVA KUNOY
October 25 - December 3, 2017
Nathalie Karg Gallery is pleased to present Rannva Kunoy’s first solo exhibition in New York. Kunoy’s new works deliberately hijack our expectations for the process of looking. The paintings demand attention. As one moves across the painting, the surface, the color and the tone of the work changes. A surface that appears to be a saturated purple shifts to an iridescent green. A group of pastel paintings made up of hues of glowing candy-like colors, which are also translucent and murky, reflect the surrounding light, shifting their appearance and enhancing their experiential nature. The flickering changes in color, though, is not an effect—it is meant to arrest the viewer’s gaze.
While the dual change of color across the surface of the paintings is being negotiated, the viewer is once again drawn in by the flurry of scored and smudged marks that make up the image created by transference in reversals. As one travels over the broad surfaces of the canvas, lines and contours with a strong photographic aura appear that bring vividly to mind shapes and objects from the real world. These are an invitation to take a look at the experience and psychology of perception. The marks themselves are difficult to categorize as both the surface and the image continuously fluctuate. There is no texture and no actual gesture. They appear to incorporate the haunted and unstable, yet deliberate and intangible. This results in an unfulfilled desire to understand how the painting was physically made, while, at the the same time recognizing embedded images that coalesce like bubbles on water before bursting again.
The works carry titles that can be described to be of an iconoclastic nature, questioning settled beliefs and institutions. In the exhibition, Kunoy presents a sophisticated painting codex— one that understands how painting can claim the viewer, perplexing and intoxicating in equal measure.
About Rannva Kunoy
Rannva Kunoy (b. 1975 in the Faroe Islands) is a painter who lives and works in London. Her canvases question the perceived hierarchy between paintings and their spatial environment. In 1999 Kunoy graduated from the Royal College of Art in London with a degree in fine art painting. Her work has been included in both solo and group exhibitions in locations such as Centre PasquArt…
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Won’t You Be My Neighbor
Peter Barrickman, Seth Cameron, Antoine Catala, Anna Condo, Jessica Craig-Martin, Jane Dickson, Jim Drain, Joe Fyfe, Dorian Gaudin, Heidi Hahn, Paul Hosking, Simon Ko, Rannva Kunoy, John Lee, Jesse Mockrin, Bridget Mullen, Nathlie Provosty, Gamaliel Rodriguez, Elsa Sahal, Myles Starr, Alice Tippit and Tim Wilson.
October 28 - December 31
View Exhibition