Almine Rech Paris opens Leelee Kimmel's first exhibition with the gallery

The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Thursday, March 28, 2024


Almine Rech Paris opens Leelee Kimmel's first exhibition with the gallery
Leelee Kimmel, Nuwar Almine Rech, Paris June 06 - July 27, 2019 © Leelee Kimmel - Photo: Rebecca Fanuele Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech.

by David Rimanelli



PARIS.- Almine Rech Paris is presenting Nuwar, Leelee Kimmel’s first exhibition with the gallery.

"Stirring up a mass of dull grey plankton, again there came the shock of sheer color — like a blow to the body, or a crashing chord to the ear. I know of no other sensation which quite equals the effect on the eye — or the brain behind the eye — as that of a great, glowing, living, rich-scarlet-red shrimp, cold as ice, just raised through a half mile of water. No flower I have ever seen in any setting could vie with it for a moment. It is worth recalling that for countless ages this shrimp and its ancestors had been merely the blackest of beings in a jet-black world, and only for the past few minutes had its blazing color existed. This may partly explain its exciting quality, like the unused rods and cones inour own retina, when we stand on our heads and look out at the world." [1]

“I am nature”, Jackson Pollock famously said, and from at least the beginnings of Abstraction artists have sought deep nature, a primal language of shapes and colors presumed to lurk deep in the mind, unpolished and unmediated by conscious rationalization. Michael Fried, equally famously, believed that the greatest Modern art was work with the condition “of existing in, indeed of secreting or constituting, a continuous and perpetual present”.

But when you look at the unconscious mind – that is, literally look, with your eyes – what do you see? After sitting for a while in a dark room, or when you’re about to doze off at night, what you see is phosphenes: those patterns, dots, grains, and swirls of (initially) weak color on a dark background caused by the more or less random firing of neurons in the retina itself. These usually start off more abstract but, as the brain’s automatic visual system begins to interpret them, they take on more figurative features, until the stage where they’re called hypnagogic hallucinations – not any of the types of stronger hallucinations that arise in the brain, but something so unmediated that even less conscious animals than ourselves – insects? planaria? – might often see something very similar. These images don’t at all live in that ideal garden of Modernism, the Unconscious: instead, they flash in an out of their half-existence in the Hadean-eon wilderness of our dimmest pre-unconscious.

Leelee Kimmel’s paintings are investigations of inner and outer space, collisions between ur-ancient, chthonic nature and the hyper-sophisticated realm of Modernist and postmodernist art histories, between the preverbal and the phantasmagoria of the library, terse and voluble, suddenly laughing then stonily silent. Kimmel’s abstract biomorphs skitter through pitch black abyssal depths, like those of Beebe’s Arcturus Adventure, at once terrifying and comic. The shapes harken back to nature, while Kimmel’s palette is neon and acid, resoundingly anti-naturalistic.

There’s a sense of potential catastrophe crowding the margins, as forms coil and ricochet through darkness: is that a turtle or a hand grenade revolving on the periphery, is that polyp a gun? Transformation is the guiding formal but also psychological and dare I say spiritual governing force in Kimmel’s dark glittering universe, fearsome and newborn, cunning monsters, mutants, aliens, explorers, invaders, these phantoms of Nuwar.

[1] William Beebe, The ‘Arcturus’ Adventure, 1926










Today's News

June 10, 2019

Exhibition of Pierre-Auguste Renoir's paintings marks centenary of his death

Rehs Contemporary opens an exhibition of majestic landscapes by Ken Salaz

Monet: Impression Sunrise launches at the National Gallery of Australia

Andrew Jones Auctions to offer close to 400 lots in next auction to be held on June 16th

Tate Modern opens the UK's first ever retrospective of the Russian avant-garde artist Natalia Goncharova

An early 'Tintin' cover sells at auction for $1.1 million

Pace announces inaugural exhibition program for new flagship Chelsea gallery opening September 2019

Georg Baselitz donates 7 works to the Bavarian State Painting Collections

Color lithograph exhibition evokes fin de siècle Paris

Simon Lee Gallery presents the European premiere of Marilyn Minter's video work My Cuntry 'Tis of Thee

MLF │ Marie-Laure Fleisch exhibits work by Claire Milbrath, Tessa Perutz, Anna Torma, and Joana Vasconcelos

Lévy Gorvy with Rumbler open inaugural exhibition during Zurich Art Weekend

Almine Rech Paris opens Leelee Kimmel's first exhibition with the gallery

Ellen Gallagher's first solo exhibition in Paris on view at Gagosian

The Academy of Fine Arts of Venice presents an installation by Peter Halley

Gondoleering goddesses teach ancient art to the masses

Italian pavilion at the Venice Biennale features works by Enrico David, Chiara Fumai, and Liliana Moro

Solo exhibition of new paintings by British artist Graham Little on view at Alison Jacques Gallery

The François Schneider Foundation opens an exhibition of works by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

Sotheby's celebrates the Apollo 11 moon landing With an auction of Omega Speedmaster watches

Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt opens an exhibition of works by John M Armleder

Rockwell Museum unveils surprise acquisition, "Tree of 40 Fruit #87"

H&H Classics to offer two Italian classics: Alfa Romeo and Lancia

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. opens a solo exhibition of new works by Terry Haggerty

The Most Expensive Art in Casinos All Around the World

Irish teenagers play slots freely




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 



Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org juncodelavega.com facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
to a Mexican poet.
Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful