Tulips

Kapp Kapp is pleased to announce Tulips, an exhibition including artists Alicia Adamerovich, Anthony Cudahy, Sam McKinniss, Justin Liam O’Brien, and Luke O’Halloran. As in Plath’s poem, the exhibition grapples with time and space, imagination and reality, past and present.

Take Cudahy’s lush and inviting oil and acrylic paintings, which piece together collected reference images with fabricated spatial and connective relationships. Often sourcing pictures from queer archives and from his own collection, Cudahy makes reference to both anonymous and known figures within his very personal, human settings.

In Adamerovich’s imagined universe, suggesting inspiration from surrealism, the artist defines new landscapes in her drawings and paintings. Creating globule nearly-recognizable forms and gradated terrains, Adamerovich at once abstracts the known while inventing a new unknown. As in Moon Love, 2019, a pencil on paper work, the artist assembles undulous plant or human appendages reaching for a moon in the distance of her distinct world.

Likewise, O’Halloran examines the magic and terror of chance with his spinning wheel paintings. Evoking the campy glamour and insidious sparkle of slot machines, O’Halloran’s work denotes both hope and fear. The artist considers his spinning wheels a representation of the constant change and tumult of our world at present, an investigation of the known and unknown of what our collective future holds. His painting inspired Sam McKinniss to make his Cherries (after Fantin-Latour), 2019- the two are exhibited side by side.

For O’Brien’s new body of work, made for this exhibition, the artist looked to the dramatic black and white photography of his friend and peer Daniel Rampulla. Applying his signature softness, O’Brien renders an intimate, ethereal reality for his figures. Usually observed in private contemplative moments, like in Sam After Daniel, 2019 the nude subject, resting on the edge of his bed, gazes quietly off beyond the canvas.

Tulips will be on view at Kapp Kapp, Philadelphia through January 25th, 2020.