A Potrait of Tony in New York Art Candy
A Candy-Obsessed Pop Painter Gets Her Due, One-half a Century Later
In 1968, Kay Kurt had a fresh MFA in painting from the University of Wisconsin in Madison and nil to say with it — until a box of chocolates at a local sweet shop stopped her cold. "I was desperate," Kurt said, laughing. "I was a painter without something to paint. I was an object-oriented person. I needed the color, I needed heft, I needed, you lot know, volume. I just knew I wasn't an abstract painter, to put it bluntly."
If Popular Art helped flatten the high/depression boundary, bonbons were, as Kurt described them, her "velvet hammer," with which she pounded out the remaining lumps. "I think the main matter that Pop offered me was the power to choose any sometime subject matter. Everything was upwards for grabs. I didn't have to feel bars in what I chose to paint."
Prototype
Her translation of that standard sampler selection was her breakthrough in the New Realist style: huge, painstaking and meditative paintings replete in texture and low-cal, which she would piece of work on for years at a time. Past the finish of the year, she was showing her opalescent visions of Jordan almonds and Jujubes with the storied Kornblee Gallery, which counted the Popular Artists Rosalyn Drexler and Richard Smith among its roster. The following year, Kurt participated in "Popular Fine art Redefined," a survey at London's Hayward Gallery that gear up out much of Popular's calendar. By 1973, she was included in the Whitney Biennial.
Pop Art burned hot and fast, and by the belatedly '80s, with appetites shifting toward Conceptualism, Kornblee shuttered her gallery and Kurt's canvases receded from the New York spotlight. That is, until this week, when "For All Her Innocent Airs, She Knew Exactly Where She Was Going," Kurt'southward first solo New York exhibition in three decades, opens at Albertz Benda.
Prototype
Kurt existed inside the mounting charge of Pop but was as well outside of it, offer a rejoinder to a lopsidedly male matter — she took Claes Oldenburg'due south manifesto, "I am for the art that a kid licks, after peeling away the wrapper," and pushed it full tilt, muscling the loftier-octane aesthetic of the movement into the delicate and feminine forms of viscous Scottie dogs and Swedish Fish. Her slick representations of molded saccharide can be slightly unsettling. In "Ever Eat Anything That Made You Experience Similar Saturday Night on Tuesday Afternoon," German language Berries languish in a dark puddle, licorice tendrils lapping at their edges — a "Garden of Earthly Delights" rendered in glucose and gelatin.
Where much of Popular was consternated with commercial civilization, offering criticism steeped in the linguistic communication of advertising graphics, Kurt, who lived in Germany for a year later finishing graduate schoolhouse, relied solely on straight observation. "I wasn't thinking in terms of a bulletin, 'Oh, look how we're such consumers that nosotros have this candy,"' she says. "But it did eventually get interesting to see how different countries looked at candy, and the regard for candy, and how it played a life in the culture of the country, especially Jujubes."
Remarkably, throughout her tenure at Jill Kornblee's gallery, Kurt was considered a New York creative person — despite having lived in New York for just 2 weeks. "My output has never been prolific, but she had enough people in the gallery that she could beget to have an oddball similar me," Kurt said. "Information technology was just cracking, until she decided to exit of business concern. The whole tone of what people wanted was changing. Pop had kind of had its 24-hour interval. It was conceptual art, David Salle, Clemente." And Kurt wasn't almost to start making minimalist polyurethane constructions. "I was no Dan Flavin," she laughs.
Image
In Duluth, Minn., where she's lived since 1970, Kurt continued to paint. "I felt actually funny at first not having a gallery in New York, and I was extremely upset and nervous about that for a long time, merely I kept painting every bit though I did have a gallery. Which isn't exactly a realistic thought, but I did, because that'south what I did in life."
Kurt'southward meticulousness volition resonate with anyone who never feels satisfied with their ain work; in 1972, she missed inclusion in the mammoth exhibition "Documenta five" because she was busy working on the selected slice by its deadline. The Albertz Benda show collects nearly all of Kurt's big-calibration paintings alongside her meaty graphite drawings, and also serves as the debut of a new painting, which, considering Kurt has been working on it since 1996, is no minor thing. Even at present, as information technology's readied in the gallery, Kurt considers it unfinished. "She was considering adding a layer of varnish," says Thorsten Albertz, a co-founder of the gallery, "but I promise she doesn't."
"There were interruptions," Kurt says of the painting, an xi-foot-wide precious stone box of pastilles and peppermints titled "Hallelujah." "I did other things, I did some drawings, I did other paintings. I didn't realize it for a while, I had a block. Each processed seemed to have its ain demands. It just took that long to finish information technology."
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/13/t-magazine/art/kay-kurt-candy-pop-painter.html
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