KANSAS CITY, MO.- Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art presenting American Montage, the first solo museum exhibition for Brooklyn-based artist Adam Cvijanovic. Cvijanovic (pronounced svee-YAHN-o-vitch) emerged to international attention as part of the America Today exhibition at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2007. The following year his work was featured in the Liverpool Biennial, Tate Liverpool, in the United Kingdom and in the widely acclaimed PROSPECT.1, New Orleans Biennial. American Montage will be on view from May 15 through September 20, 2015, at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri. Admission is free.

American Montage draws on Brooklyn-based artist Adam Cvijanovic’s merging of influences from nineteenth-century American landscape painting and twentieth-century cinematic techniques. The exhibition features installations and paintings on his signature Tyvek surfaces from the past fifteen years. Cvijanovic’s methods of fracturing, cutting, layering, and sequencing imagery to collapse space, time, and narrative demonstrate a montage of American visual perspective. The exhibition premiers three new works: Flint Hills (2015), inspired by the artist’s site visit in fall 2014; Hollywood and Sunset (2014–15) his reintroduction of the figure in almost a decade; and The Fall (Capri) (2015), Cvijanovic’s first work to include a soundtrack.

“The idea (of the soundtrack),” says Cvijanovic, “is that the paintings function as parts of a symphony orchestra. They are playing strands of a piece of music in a way that has a temporal read to it. When you’re hearing this text, everything becomes super narrative, like you’re watching a movie or a slide show, and the gallery itself becomes a kind of envelope of all time. And then when you look suddenly at the images with just the linear context and no soundtrack, the odd thing that happens (when I’ve tested it) is that they feel like memories.”

Among the 13 works on view, the exhibition also includes Cvijanovic’s monumentally iconic Belshazzar’s Feast 2008. This work is comprised of nine 16 ½-foot-high free-standing wooden panels, and takes inspiration from D. W. Griffith’s 1916 silent epic Intolerance, in particular the narrative’s climax that unfolds in the court of ancient Babylon. This pivotal film and elaborately designed film set has been an ongoing source of inspiration for Cvijanovic since 2007.

Born, 1960 in Cambridge, MA. He has previously exhibited at UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art, Philadelphia; PROSPECT.1, New Orleans; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, UK; Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China; The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia; Mass MOCA, North Adams, MA; Queens Museum, Queens, NY; Yale University Museum, New Haven, CT; and the New Museum, New York. Cvijanovic lives and works in New York.