About Topsy Turvy Perceptions… October 1962

Paul Kolker is pleased to present, About Topsy Turvy Perceptions… October 1962, at the PAUL KOLKER collection in Chelsea from November 15, 2018 through January 26, 2019. The exhibition features paintings, sculpture and live interactive video documenting some of the the artist’s most difficult to fathom perceptions experienced while Chief of the 3565 USAF Clinics at James Connally AFB, Waco, TX during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis; as if the world had then gone topsy turvy… turned upside down in utter confusion.

James Connally AFB was a navigator training base under the Air Training Command. Major General Carl Truesdell, Jr of the Tactical Air Command (TAC) and his family were Kolker’s patients. During the nearly two weeks of the Cuban Missile Crisis Kolker met at least daily with General Truesdell to examine, evaluate and submit daily medical reports to the TAC center at Bolling AFB, Washington, DC and to Wilford Hall Hospital, Lackland AFB, San Antonio, TX. What Kolker learned at that time were the general’s extraordinary caring and leadership skills commanding crews flying low altitude missions to photograph the topography of Cuba beneath the persistent cloud cover. Some of those photographs showing nuclear ballistic missiles and launchers appeared printed in the New York Times for the world to see. Somehow, Kolker says, General Truesdell had been capable of inverting the topsy turvy into a clear and correct side up view, as if his World War II heroic flying missions trained him to always see things not as a spectacular illusion from high in the sky; but veridically, as they truly are.

The artist has created and curated this exhibition to be hung upside down… topsy turvy, to test the viewer’s perception of faces, places and objects. Watching television sidewise from the supine position can be perceptually challenging enough. Watching upside down can be utterly confusing. Brain science defines specific areas in the brain for the recognition of faces, places and objects. Inverted faces and some text seem to be the most difficult to perceive without the crutches of an inverted video display screen or glass gazing ball; or standing on one’s head.

The paintings in the exhibition are overlain with halftone dots in a process which the artist calls synthèse; the amalgamation of a figural painting with an abstract dot painting in which the subjacent colors of the figural components are captured and exaggerated within the dots; as depicted above in Kolker’s topsy turvy women strike for peace 1962, synthèse, 2018.

Paul Kolker (b. 1935) is a New York based artist with doctorate degrees in medicine and law. He is Fellow American College of Surgeons, Fellow American College of Legal Medicine and Emeritus Chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Northwell 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. About Topsy Turvy Perceptions… October 1962 is Kolker’s sixty-seventh solo exhibition.

In Paul Kolker: About Topsy Turvy Perceptions… October 1962, thirty one new works are on view from November 15 through January 26, 2019 at the Paul Kolker collection, 511 West 25th Street in Chelsea, adjacent to the HighLine between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues.

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