Shapes, Spaces and Surfaces, Redux

[May 2, 2013] Paul Kolker presents an exhibition of his new paintings which test the viewers’ perceptual relationships between abstract and figurative images superimposed on the same canvas and in light sculptures which repetitively reflect into the blackened depths of an imaginary space.

Kolker revisits his 2007 series of exhibitions, Forms, Spaces and Surfaces, however now with a particular focus on painting his iconic dots on a readily identifiable picture of a textured surface printed on canvas. For his works in this exhibition, Kolker photographed surfaces of various materials in his home; such as marble and travertine tiles, wood panels, stucco and brick walls, fabrics of cloth and leather, and even the raw canvas used in his paintings. Perhaps because of everyday familiarity, the walls, floors, ceilings, tiles, draperies and upholstery of our homes are barely noticed, as are the usual background noises, lest there be a spill, stain or foreign object on them. Therefore, Kolker has painted in tints and shades his minimal, while abstract, lattice-grids of dots on transformed photographs of wood, marble, bricks or canvas printed in archival inkjet on canvas.

In 1975, when he purchased a first generation projector television, Kolker became instantly aware that we have begun to see things differently because of those images made up of colored dots, or pixels, projected onto a surface, then a parabolic silvered screen. Resolution was low and when the image was projected on a wall, the surface interacted, like a funhouse mirror does, with the dot arrays of the television image if there were, perhaps, curves, a seam or nail-pop. Zoomed in-close, the colored dots, although now abstracted from the figurative projected image, for Kolker always remained the essence of the projected image.

Kolker throughout the decades has remained loyal to his digital age dots first seen on his low definition projector. Those dots are now extant; in the current high definition rectilinear grids of television, computer, smart-phone and digital camera screens; as well as the curvilinear grids of dots used in Ishihara color vision testing and the overlain color halftone and other non digital print format dots. He has painted and silkscreened those dots onto canvases and reflected them in his light-boxes. Kolker notes that digital technologies have altered the way we view our surroundings from afar and up-close, melding identifiably figurative shapes when viewed from afar and their illusory microscopic dot abstractions when viewed up-close on that same computer display screen when using the now ever available zoom apparatus.

Kolker, when producing and curating this exhibition, uses the experimental method in which the viewer has become the measuring instrument to study perception. His thesis statement for this exhibition predicates that “Although shapes such as dots when painted on a white or black background may seem to be fungible, when they are superimposed on a textured surface, much like graffiti art, those dots somehow alter our perception of them and of the surface onto which they are painted and take on a new meaning.”

Paul Kolker (b. 1935, Brooklyn, NY) is Emeritus Chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery, North Shore/ LIJ Glen Cove Hospital. Since 2001, he has had thirty-seven 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 Hofstra School of Medicine, Uniondale, NY.

Paul Kolker: Shapes, Spaces and Surfaces, Redux is on view from May 2 through July 3, 2013 at 511 West 25th Street with an opening reception on Thursday, May 2 from 6 to 8PM. For additional information please visit paulkolker.com or email info@paulkolker.com