Splash, Spray and Splatter…KILL LIES ALL!

Paul Kolker is pleased to present Splash, Spray and Splatter… KILL LIES ALL! at the PAUL KOLKER collection from March 17 through May 6, 2016.

Kolker’s inspiration for this exhibition is the splatter silhouette made by paintballs; iconic for a destructive act of force rather than a creative one. Kolker self-curates this exhibition as an experiment in perception; raising the following thesis questions: Does an intentional act of vandalism to a painting, such as splattering it with red paint or spray painting it with red graffiti text, negatively change how we perceive the painting? Or, could such splattering and sprayed text alter the intent of the painting and, perhaps by providing a choice of meanings on the same canvas, make the work even more creatively expansive by jogging the viewer’s perception?

In Kolker’s From Guernica to Benghazi… KILL LIES ALL!, 2016, the red painted splatter and graffiti text are scumbled over the photo-collaged blue transformation of Picasso’s 1937 grayscale masterwork used as the historical background for Kolker’s rendition of a Libyan fighter with hands and gun raised high in the same heavenward posture of Picasso’s human bombing victims. Kolker’s painting, in twenty-eight parts and 132×231 inches, is modular like giant television flatscreens which are ganged together. The image is fractionated, and overlaid with a 9dpi red dot grid; expanding the artist’s palette to red, white and blue. Over the painting is a large stenciled paintball splatter. Also scumbled over the painting is the same graffiti text, “KILL LIES ALL”, spray painted over Picasso’s Guernica on exhibition at MOMA in 1974 by the then young artist, and today’s accomplished gallerist, Tony Shafrazi.

Kolker’s interest as an artist is beyond the solitary work of art. His focus is working as both artist and curator; creating an exhibition of many works which confront the viewer with questions which test his or her experience and understanding. For example, Kolker’s art is replete with innuendo from contemporary media, television, smart phones and computers. The voice in his works is a reflection or glimmer of how we are currently viewing, and particularly perceiving, the world of images and ideas which envelop us in rectilinear dot grids of all sorts on flat screens… And which we barely notice in real-time.

Kolker’s voice is also scientifically based in the experimental psychology of Solomon Asch and Irvin Rock in which human perception is tested. For example, Kolker purposely uses the stenciled splatter silhouette of the paintball, having been fired from the rifle, impacting the canvas as an act of force…which is either destructive or creative, depending on the viewer’s perception. Such yin-yang interpretation is encouraged in Kolker’s Big Bang, 2016, in black and white acrylic on canvas, 110×110 inches… wherein a cataclysmic explosive force, depicted as a white paintball splatter, reminds us, along with the artist’s title, of the scientific theory for the creation of the universe.

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 his current address in the Chelsea art district so that he could produce his works and curate his exhibitions as an experiment in perception. His studio and gallery have together become his laboratory in which the viewer is the measuring instrument for Kolker’s art as a perceptual experiment. Splash, Spray and Splatter…KILL LIES ALL! is Kolker’s fifty-second solo exhibition.

In Splash, Spray and Splatter… KILL LIES ALL!, eighteen paintings and sculpture will be on view at the Paul Kolker collection from March 17, 2016 through May 6, 2016 at 511 West 25th Street in Chelsea adjacent to the High Line between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. For further information please email info@paulkolker.com.