17 March – 17 April 2010
David Korty's latest show with Sadie Coles HQ marks a significant development in his painting. His new works continue to explore the terrain and topography of his native Los Angeles – a curving highway, hacienda or gas pump – yet they move strongly towards abstraction through a stylised reformulation of their photographic source material. Litter on a pavement is depicted through a network of interlocking planes that evoke synthetic Cubist collages. In another painting, sketches strewn across a table form a similarly angular structure, and the pictures they contain are reduced to automatist squiggles.
The human figures in Korty's paintings are also examined in terms of elementary shapes. A painting of figures assembling a puzzle on a yellow tabletop incorporates minimal geometric forms and vivid colours reminiscent of the De Stijl movement, with the bodies radically simplified in the same fashion as the objects. Elsewhere, a girl's head is represented through expanses of uniform tone; yet Korty's interest in the decorative possibilities of basic shapes and arabesque outlines is evinced by the butterfly shapes in her hair.
Korty's compositions involve a fluid and rhythmic interplay of line, shape and colour that distances us from their source images. His use of photographs as a starting point for his paintings derives from the camera's power to isolate and frame a moment: “When the slides are developed and I drop one into the projector it's been mediated and flattened, sort of 'cooled off.' Such a process of mediation anticipates the way in which Korty's style itself translates and remodels reality: space is distilled into pools of hazy pigment; and perspective is flattened in order to elucidate underlying linear structures and patterns.
Indeed, as critic and novelist Rachel Kushner has observed, “depth, everywhere, wavers in and out of view, as the painting seems surface-worked and perspectival”. Korty's handling of paint compounds his works' sense of flatness and materiality: the pigment has often been granulated, scratched or blotted off (in a technique reminiscent of Warhol's 'blotted line' drawings) to reveal the texture of the underlying canvas.
David Korty was born in California in 1971. He trained at the Rhode Island School of design and the
University of California, Los Angeles. David Korty has been exhibited widely throughout the United
States and Europe. He has recently exhibited at Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles (2010) and IM
Art, Korea (2009). His work has featured in group shows including Painting Codes: I Codici della
Pittura, Galleria Comunale d'Arte Contemporanea di Monfalcone, Monfalcone, Italy, 2006;
Landscape Confection, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio, 2005; My Head is On Fire But my Heart is Full of Love, Charlottenburg Exhibition Hall, Copenhagen, 2004; Painting on the Move, Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, and Kunsthalle Basel, 2002. In 2008 a new book on the artist's work featuring a text by Rachel Kushner was published by Sadie Coles HQ, Michael Kohn Gallery and Koenig Books.
09 April – 17 May 2008
'And yet delirium still prevails, the delirium of inwardness in public space, and in the contradictory idea that a painted image, despite its flatness, can still transport us.'
Rachel Kushner
David Korty's recent work portrays a stylistically complex space in which his calligraphic alphabet of pencil lines, paint strokes, and colour forms coalesce into dense, seamless compositions. The simple images of everyday life - women reading magazines, couples milling about, figures waiting in line, and a man surveying a botanical garden, betray the seeming mundanity of the subjects and reveal a kind of slow-burning introspection. The stillness of the figures and shapes in the paintings give way to a roving movement of the eye and hand. A voracious curiosity that asks us to look closer at the things which are already in front of us.
In these new paintings Korty adopts a more muted palette and elaborates organic form into geometric pattern. The painting Untitled (women at computers) (2007) uses tones of grey, blue and black, while other parts of the canvas are left bare. The viewer's attention is drawn first to the foreground where a woman is conveyed using simple monochromatic line-work. The space behind her then becomes apparent, in which those elements are echoed and re-echoed like a repeating melody. The curved line that represents the first woman's shoulder is repeated to form the distant figures behind her and the same line is then beguilingly inverted to create the curve in the first and second women’s hair. It is as if the motif were a letter being upended by a child who has discovered an “M” by inverting the letter “W”. Not to say that these paintings are overtly playful or carefree: a resolute sense of the "matter of fact" is evident throughout and whatever painterly technique is used, it remains subservient to the larger, more complex idea at hand.
David Korty was born in 1971 in California, United States of America. He lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited widely, including the group shows: Painting Codes: I Codici della Pittura, Galleria Comunale d'Arte Contemporanea di Monfalcone, Monfalcone, Italy, 2006; Landscape Confection,The Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio, 2005; My Head is On Fire But my Heart is Full of Love, Charlottenburg Exhibition Hall, Copenhagen, 2004; Painting on the Move, Kunstmuseum Basel; Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, 2002. To coincide with the exhibition a new book on the artist's work featuring a text by Rachel Kushner will be published by Sadie Coles HQ, Michael Kohn Gallery and Koenig Books.
07 June – 29 July 2006
“The thoughtful perambulating loner desires a special kind of uplift from this communion with all and sundry. He who can readily identify with the crowd enjoys ecstatic delights which are forever denied to the egoist who is locked inside himself as in a coffer or to the lazy minded fellow trapped in his own shell like an oyster. He can make every profession his own, and make his all those joys and miseries that circumstance may bring his way.
In his new body of paintings David Korty’s landscapes have become markedly more populated. In earlier works the paintings evoked the atmosphere of the urban landscape through architecture, space and intimations of climate. The focus has now shifted towards streets bustling with pedestrians, cyclists and car drivers, thronging public squares, visitors on the steps and at the information desk of a museum. Instead of the impression of a detached observer, Korty enters the fray and conjures up the excitement of the crowded metropolis and the hurly burly of city life.
Korty conveys a sensory encounter with our surroundings. As he explores the effect of light and colour on glass, water and texture, the drama is in this interplay rather than in the scene depicted. In these new paintings he has introduced stronger geometric elements and a more distilled palette, combining oil and wax pencil to a denser, more forceful effect. The overall impression is bolder, the aesthetic more stylized, as Korty taps out his own pictorial Morse code.
David Korty lives and works in Los Angeles and this is his third solo exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ. A catalogue of Korty’s work has been published this year.
1 June - 3 July 2004
In his paintings of the urban landscape David Korty initially focused on his native Los Angeles. His predilection in painting his home town was for soft colours and a heightened sensual atmosphere. Marrying this palette to delicate brushstrokes, the scenes acquire an ethereal quality, as Korty explores the impact of light on the city’s streets, parks and buildings. There is a sense of experimentation, a search for how best to convey the peculiarities of the atmosphere, both in terms of ambience, but more specifically in the climatic sense. This quest, together with the aesthetic, recalls the innovations of the Impressionists, with their forays into pointillism and whole series dedicated to exploring the impact of different light conditions on the same scene. Korty’s landscapes also share the Impressionists’ positive, celebratory approach towards the metropolitan environment, as the industrial age dawned bringing with it a new prosperity and a nascent leisure culture.
In his recent landscapes Korty has begun to consider other cities, including Venice and London. He has become emboldened too in his choice of colour, as he paints with brighter and stronger tones. This, coupled with a freer application of paint, adds warmth and a renewed vigour to the fundamental optimism of these paintings. Figures remain, by and large absent, but where they can be seen, scale dictates that they are anonymous miniatures, dwarfed into insignificance by the majesty of their surroundings. In a monochrome painting, where we peer through trees at rain-drenched, grey streets, where cars file by, nose to tail, there is nonetheless a sense of the dynamism of the city, once celebrated by the Futurists, along with the energy of urban life. An energy that reaches the viewers as they are urged into activity; for while the paintings are easy on the eye, devoid of any jarring elements, the eye needs to work, to pick out the figurative from the decorative and steadily absorb the atmosphere of the city.
David Korty lives and works in Los Angeles. He showed at HQ as part of a gallery swap with China Art Objects, Los Angeles and then had a solo show here in 2002. His work has been included in group and solo shows in Europe and the U.S.
13 February to 16 March 2002
American painter David Korty is known for his phosphorescent depictions of his hometown of Los Angeles. Working in watercolour, pencil and acrylic, on paper or canvas, Korty’s evocative studies of the illuminated Hollywood hills at night, the mist-obscured high-rises of Downtown, people on the subway, at the beach or in Griffith Park employ a chromatic exaggeration of architectural and atmospheric space. More related to the paintings of Turner or Seurat than to romantic imagined landscape paintings, Korty employs abstraction only as a tool for precise representation. The key is the artist’s real-time experience of the depicted environment and his communication of that optical reality – these are landscapes he has inhabited, photographed, enjoyed.
Like his recent show in New York, Korty’s first solo London exhibition reflects the local environment. Working from photographic records, the imagery includes scenes from a recent visit to London such as the Underground and a motorway in the rain, alongside paintings of the unique urban topography of Los Angeles.
David Korty lives and works in Los Angeles. His work was included in the Gallery Swap with China Art Objects at Sadie Coles HQ in 1999.