Kevin Lowenthal
Mannequins in Audience
Derek Eller Gallery, New York
October 25 - December 21, 2024
Through the Window, Through the Door, 2024
Oil on cotton on linen, 80 x 64 inches
© Kevin Lowenthal, courtesy Derek Eller Gallery
Derek Eller Gallery presents a solo exhibition of new paintings by KEVIN LOWENTHAL entitled Mannequins in Audience in the North Room of the gallery. With a background in weaving and textile, Lowenthal encrusts his surfaces with a textured mixture of cotton and layered oil paint, creating a rich, fibrous ground on which to build worlds, investigate forms, and uncover signifiers.
Confined to liminal, compact interiors, Lowenthal’s architectural dreamscapes are often inhabited by lingering, faceless figures. Provoking a sense of theatricality, curtains frame each scene, setting the stage for domestic interiors bound together in one enigmatic space. In 2 Blonde Mannequins in Conversation, the pattern of the figures’ hair matches that of the curtains. Rather than acting as hard, definitive boundaries, the curtains appropriate the fluidity of hair. This malleable relationship of forms ignites a cyclical reinforcement of performance and body, of object and texture. The settings in which these shapes and objects exist possess a vastness akin to a free-roam video game where viewers can choose to stay within the limits of a prefabricated narrative or enter portals that go beyond.
In fact, the initial source of Lowenthal’s imagery derives from the survival-horror video game Silent Hill. In some of the rooms in Silent Hill, wall paint peels away to expose bare concrete. This fracturing inspires the rip, or the glitch, in the painting Patched Overworld. Reminiscent of the energy fields and the jagged dramas of Clyfford Still, Kevin Lowenthal leaves parts of the canvas untouched in order to expose the pale, raw cotton surface. As if to provide a window into the canvas, Kevin Lowenthal pulls back the curtain to expose the thingness of the painting itself.
As in a theatrical presentation, Kevin Lowenthal controls how much information he exposes. In Through the Window, Through the Door, architectural forms are taken out of context and reduced to only their signifiers: a rectangle becomes a door because of the presence of a doorknob; a grid becomes a window only because of its transparency. Modeled after plastic heads, the human-like figure, or mannequin, calls attention to the synthetic nature of doors, windows, and furnishings. These familiar objects and their vacant resemblance to the real world create an overall atmosphere which is both mysterious and unsettling.
KEVIN LOWENTHAL (b. 1994, Philadelphia, PA) lives and works in New York, NY. Lowenthal received a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. Lowenthal recently had a solo exhibition at 243 Luz in Margate, UK. Recent group exhibitions include Brigette Mulholland, Paris, France; Anton Kern Gallery, New York, NY; and Ruby/Dakota, New York, NY. This is his first solo exhibition in New York City.
DEREK ELLER GALLERY
38 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013
