Flatland Redux…The New Abstract!

Paul Kolker presents Flatland Redux…The New Abstract! at the PAUL KOLKER collection opening November 20, 2014 and running through January 17, 2015. The exhibition of paintings, drawings, photographic prints and light sculptures is about the sectioning of our multidimensional world of space and time into flat planes of canvas, paper and mirror. Kolker, the artist, curator and producer, uses topographic maps of the terrains of hills and valleys in the Berkshires which he has hiked and climbed. He also uses tomographic sections of common foods, like slices of a loaf of bread, to remind us that our real world of space is a mega-sandwich of re-imagined planes from the novel Flatland.

As an artist, also working for more than a half-century as a surgeon, Kolker is skilled in the technology of three-dimensional modeling and volumetric sectioning as used in the sciences for the tomograms of the human anatomy and geographic and astronomic maps of our planet and universe. As a surgeon, he has used X-rays, CAT scans, MRIs, PET scans and CT/PET scans of thin images which are stacked in slices, like a cut loaf of bread, or a transected hard boiled egg; both paintings in the show, used to emphasize this point.

Kolker’s inspiration for this exhibition is the 1884, novel by Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland, A Romance of Many Dimensions, which describes a universe beyond the third dimension decades before Einstein’s Theory of Relativity had incorporated the dimensions of time and the related positions of observers in space. Abbott viewed his Flatland world as elemental Euclidian shapes; as if he had preternaturally foreseen the satellite photographs of today with horizontal views of objects appearing to be triangles, rectangles, polygons and circles.

The satellite, Google and surveyor’s topographical maps used for many of the artist’s hikes have become the templates for the works in this show. One hike, starting in Sturbridge, MA at the Housitonic River, to the Ice Glen, a Berkshire glacier, and peaking with a climb up Laura’s Tower served as the inspiration for a series of abstract paintings as laura’s tower lignes sur bleu, 2014, a detail of which is depicted above.

Paul Kolker (b. 1935) is a New York based artist with doctorate degrees in medicine and law. He is Emeritus Chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery at North Shore/ LIJ Glen Cove Hospital, having practiced cardiothoracic surgery on Long Island from 1969 to 2013. In October 2001, Kolker moved his Long Island studio to Studio 601, now the PAUL KOLKER collection, in the Chelsea art district so that he could work with other artists to assist him in his art production, much like his physician assistants, residents and fellows have assisted him as a heart surgeon; and also develop his curatorial skills in orchestrating and directing his exhibitions in his own gallery spaces. Flatland Redux…The New Abstract! is Kolker’s forty-fifth solo exhibition which he has produced and self-curated.

Eighteen works, paintings and sculpture, are on view in Paul Kolker’s exhibition, Flatland Redux…The New Abstract!, at the PAUL KOLKER collection, 511 West 25th Street in Chelsea from November 20, 2014 through January 17, 2015.