GROOVEFUCKER

by John Kissick

March 25 – May 5, 2011

Vernissage: Friday, March 25th from 19h (7pm)

View exhibition
Artist page
Press release as pdf
German version

“John Kissick’s oil and acrylic paintings don’t have an accessible flow. If his clashing colors and loud patterns were translated into music, it would not be an easy groove. This
disjunction gives his exhibition title its punch and his art its joy. Kissick disrupts the surface of his canvases with an intense and enlivening energy akin to hardcore dance music or techno. He creates this effect by scrambling Pop Art-like commercial colors and slinky forms into his densely packed imagery.”

-Ana Finel Honigman
(from Saatchi Online, Ana Finel Honigman’s Top 10 Berlin Shows, March 2011)

Wilde Gallery is pleased to present Groovefucker, the first solo exhibition of Canadian
painter John Kissick on the European continent.

John Kissick’s abstracted paintings derive inspiration from the musical genres that defined his early adulthood, specifically disco and punk. Considering the attributes historically accredited to each movement, from disco’s hyper-produced repetitive pop to punk’s defiant DIY ethos and anti-establishment posturing, Kissick’s paintings are self-contained contradictions, both formally and conceptually.

For Groovefucker, Kissick will present a new body of work that continues his stylized
interpretation of these themes. Often reworking or “remixing” older canvases, Kissick has developed a signature aesthetic that vacillates between pop and expressionism, between glossy, sugar-coated order and rebellious, unpredictable chaos.

In direct response to his own conflicts with the tradition of abstract modernism, Kissick’s
visual language has marked its territory somewhere between idealism and cynicism, in an ironic search for the “authentic.” In his “anti-manifesto manifesto”, Kissick writes, “since authenticity is so pre-Twitter, I’m beginning to think that a good, honest fake, a heartfelt lie, or some good, honest introspective indifference might be a reasonable starting place for any serious commentary on the critical dynamics of abstract painting today. It is here that the disco of our collective contemporary discourse appears to trump our personal punk of individual expectation.”

In addition to painting, Kissick is a prolific writer who has published essays in numerous
academic volumes (ie Art: Context and Criticism, Brown and Benchmark Publishers, Madison, WI and John Calmann and King Ltd., London). Kissick’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, the Shanghai Art Museum and the Guangdong Museum of Art, among others. The artist lives and works in Canada, where he is the Director of the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph.

For more information, please contact the gallery.

vernissage
Friday, March 25th from 19h (7pm)

exhibition
March 25 – May 5, 2011

opening hours
Wed – Sat | 12 – 18 h

location
WILDE GALLERY
Chausseestrasse 7
D-10115 Berlin
info@wilde-gallery.com
www.wilde-gallery.com