Crossing Tenth Avenue

[New York, October 10, 2013] Paul Kolker is pleased to present Crossing Tenth Avenue, an exhibition of his light sculptures and paintings opening on October 10, 2013 at Paul Kolker, 511 West 25th Street. Kolker creates new works and curates this exhibition about the artist’s journey in the summer of 2001, at the dawning of the West Chelsea art district, to work in what he calls ‘the epicenter of the art universe.’ His body of work is distinguished through the synthesis of his unique art production processes, the variety of media he uses, including reflected light and video, as well as his accomplished curatorial skills in having thus far put together forty of his own solo shows, including this one, in his own exhibition space.

Kolker found something magical about the natural selection and congregation of dealers, curators, gallerists and artists, followed by the viewers and collectors, their agents and art tour guides into this Chelsea art district of refurbished high ceilinged warehouses. Kolker was already part of those collector and museum patron tours before the new millennium, often led by curators, then crossing south of Houston and later crossing west of Tenth Avenue into the new Chelsea art district. The aura of the collective neighborhood of galleries and studios was to Kolker one of art in progress; never static, but ever changing and filled with creative energy. As a patron circle member of the Guggenheim Museum, the artist had already participated in educational programs and visited, often with museum curators, numerous contemporary art galleries and artist studios. In December 2000, having then worked in his Long Island studio for more than twenty-seven years, Kolker decided to make his artistic leap of faith to work both as an artist and curator in Chelsea. The top tier galleries were already moving in. Kolker set his mark, and in the summer 2001, with the help of an artist colleague, he found his current Chelsea location. Kolker also learned that artists feed off the creative backwashes and inspirations of their fellow artists; just like surgeons do. So he surrounded himself with artists; and over the years, with lots of artists. He walks the same walk, and talks the same talk!

Kolker’s work is iconic for our digital culture; a grid matrix of dots, rectangles or pixels as we are used to seeing them on our smart phone, television and computer screens. The dots are reminiscent of particle physics and the currently espoused structural theory of our universe. Those shapes that the dots form transcend Euclidian geometry and enter into the realm of the new fractal geometry of Benoit Mandelbrot, in which “clouds are not spheres, and mountains are not cones…” Like those iterative processes in fractal geometry, Kolker’s light and mirror sculptures echo an expansive illusion in an imaginary space many times larger than the physical dimensions of the real sculpture.

Kolker’s works are new media. They test our perceptive faculties like an experiment does; but we are the subjective measuring device. His color theory is based on the human sensorium and its neurophysiological optic tract color palette of R,G,B and Y, (rather than optical RGB or pigment CMYK). Kolker has coined ‘fracolor’ to describe his fractionated color palette; founded, using his artistic license, much like a poet chooses her words. He avoids mixing elemental colors with each other, but only with black and/or white forming a myriad of tints and shades. The human visual cortex will do the optical color mixing to create the violets, umbres and other complex colors.

The exhibition features four large scale paintings and a fifth which repeatedly reflects its image along all three axes within a cubic mirrored room. Each painting is unique but tells that same story of crossing Tenth Avenue as if it were the River Jordan and West Chelsea were the promised land of the fine arts. Twelve light sculptures simultaneously play the same video of pedestrians, cyclists, cars, cabs and trucks crossing Tenth Avenue; however each stream out the illusion that both the real and the imaginary Crossing Tenth Avenue into the realm of the arts is everywhere; a ceremony repeated in space and time, and in our memories. And that expansive dreamlike illusion appears to us to be almost infinite.

Paul Kolker (b. 1935, Brooklyn, NY) is Emeritus Chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery, North Shore/LIJ Glen Cove Hospital. Since 2001, he has had thirty-nine solo exhibitions at his Chelsea gallery where he both curates his exhibitions and produces his art. In 2012 he had a year-long solo exhibition of a retrospective of fifty-seven works, Paul Kolker: The Art of Medicine. Empirical, Intuitive…or Both? at North Shore/ LIJ Hofstra School of Medicine, Uniondale, NY.

In Paul Kolker: Crossing Tenth Avenue, sixteen light sculptures and five paintings are on view 10 AM to 6 PM, Monday through Saturday, from October 10, 2013 through January 10, 2014 at Paul Kolker, 511 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. For appointments for evening or weekend viewing, or for additional information please contact the gallery at info@paulkolker.com.