Standards and Horizons

[July 11, 2013] Paul Kolker is pleased to present Standards and Horizons, an exhibition of light sculptures and paintings opening on July 11, 2013 at the artist’s Chelsea gallery. Kolker creates new works and curates this exhibition to serve as an experiment in the perception of imaginary spaces of vertical and horizontal intersecting planes. His general body of work is distinguished through the synthesis of his unique art production processes, the variety of media he uses, including reflected light, and his accomplished curatorial skills in having thus far put together thirty-nine of his own solo shows, including this one.

Paul Kolker’s works remind us about how we see pictures differently in our digital age of television, smart phone and computer screens. Dots have become more than ben day and halftones of print formats. They are today the pixels which are formatted into an image giving the same definition and gestural fluidity as an analog painting, screen-print or chemically processed photograph. Instead of made by brush, these almost microscopic dots are echanically sprayed on to paper, plastic film or canvas or electronically arranged in grids in films containing diodes emitting light as in our current display screens.

Reflections of light within a mirrored box create an imaginary dimension of depth in all planes, and a repetition of imaginary images, like mirages, in every direction. Standards and Horizons connotes the intersecting vertical and horizontal planes of our physical world of three dimensions. An image of two dimensions, on one plane, when illuminated within the artist’s light sculptures reflects repeatedly until the light energy source is absorbed by the mirrors and escapes out of the one way mirrored sculpture, some to the viewer’s retina. What the viewer will see in Paul Kolker, standard iterati, 2013, a light sculpture of a minimal, single LED-lighted bar with rounded ends, is the photographed detail of the illusion depicted above.

Paul Kolker (b. 1935, Brooklyn, NY) is Emeritus Chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery, North Shore/LIJ Glen Cove Hospital. Since 2001, he has had thirty-eight 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: Standards and Horizons, twenty light sculptures and paintings are on view 10 AM to 6 PM, Monday through Friday, from July 11 through September 27, 2013 at the Paul Kolker gallery, 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.