Jay Kvapil Landscapes
Magen H Gallery, New York in collaboration with Galerie Lefebvre & Fils, Paris, are pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition Jay Kvapil Landscapes at Magen H Gallery from September 19, 2017 and October 19, 2017. The exhibition will present around 60 pieces representing the current work of contemporary american ceramist Jay Kvapil. Through diverse shapes, glazes, textures or color ranges, Jay Kvapil Landscape offers an intimate journey through the landscapes - whether literal or imaginary - surrounding the artist.
"When I started making pottery again in 2004 after a long hiatus, my desire was to get to the very core of the ceramic process and the history of pottery -- glazes that melt, fuse, bubble, crawl, and drip in the heat of the kiln covering minimal pottery forms that defy gravity, with the result being a narration of that process frozen in time. […] To me, the one essential ingredient of all good art -- whether it is visual art, music, literature, theater, dance, or film – is that it has tension. Without tension, it isn’t art. Jazz has tension; elevator music does not.
My work is to study the tension between what might be considered ugly or abject, and what might be considered beautiful. And, to be critical of my own work, as hard as I try to find the point right in the middle, it usually ends up more toward the latter. […] Most of the recent pieces allude to landscape, intentionally so. After all, I grew up in Arizona, which is a land of vast desert landscapes, but it is also rich in intimate pictorial spaces found in small rocks and stones. Some of the pieces have an obvious horizon line, giving them a distant landscape, while others depict an intimate landscape through which we travel – whether literally or in our minds --without a specific reference."
