Kyle Staver: Recent Work

February 17 - March 20, 2010
Opening reception Thursday, February 18, 5 to 7 pm
Catalog available Lohin Geduld Gallery is proud to present our third exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Kyle Staver. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with an essay by independent curator and critic, Karen Wilkin.

In this series of recent paintings Kyle Staver continues her exploration of intimate scenes while incorporating pensive hues and darker themes. Throughout her career Staver has portrayed the joys of the ordinary world of afternoon bike rides, morning cups of coffee and dressing for the day. Her new paintings depict figure skaters flying through the air and Canada geese soaring overhead. These scenes, with their deepened palette and monumental compositions, evoke masters such as Gustave Courbet and Pablo Picasso.  A number of paintings in this body of new work depart from the domestic arena to delve into allegorical realms of spatial and emotional complexity.  In one painting, a voluptuous woman on horseback gazes unashamed out at the viewer, while in another two men are completely engrossed in an almost savage hunt for snapping turtles.  As Karen Wilkin describes in the catalog, Here, unlike the paintings of domesticity, it seems clear that something not only specific but probably significant is happening. But what is it?  In contrast to the sense of unremarkable contentment in Stavers domestic pictures, theres an elusive suggestion of the disquieting, a suggestion intensified by unstable space, more tipped and layered than in many of Stavers previous works. This sense of the preternatural and the uncanny defines this new body of Kyle Stavers paintings and prints.  

In the exhibition catalog, Wilkin continues, Staver's new paintings and prints constitute some of her most vigorous, engaging work to date.  They reaffirm that the time-honored tradition of painterly figure painting and the medium of paint on canvas are still vital and provocative."

Kyle Staver received her BA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and her MFA in Painting from Yale University in 1987. Additionally, she attended Camberwell College of Arts in London.  Her work has been exhibited at Lohin Geduld Gallery, Denise Bibro Fine Art and Maurice Arlos Fine Art in New York, and at Hackett -Freedman Gallery in San Francisco.  Staver is a recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award and the Benjamin Altman Figure Prize from the National Academy of Design . Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times , The New York Sun, The New York Observer and The Hudson Review.