Exhibitions

MARTIN KAHNLE: THE CURVE OF THE CURRENT

Modfellows Art Gallery / 3655 Trousdale Dr., Studio C April 23 - May 28th (Reception: April 23 6:00pm - 9:00pm)

Martin Kahnle

Modfellows is proud to exhibit works by painter Martin Kahnle in his second solo exhibition at Modfellows. He will be presenting his new wave American landscapes on canvas. Over the last two years, Kahnle has been developing a body of landscape paintings in Flashe, a vinyl paint with a flat, matte finish and a vivid, high-color presence that pushes the works into a different visual language. The surface is drier, flatter, and more graphic than oil, and that shift opened something up for Kahnle. The works became bolder, more distilled, and a little stranger-in the best way. These paintings begin in the landscapes of Tennessee, North Georgia, and the broader Southeast, but they are not trying to document a place literally. Kahnle is more interested in the emotional truth of a landscape-how it feels in memory, how color can sharpen it, bend it, and make it more itself than realism ever could. The easiest way to describe this body of work is probably as a romantic fling between David Hockney and a classic Warner Bros. cartoon. Somehow, they had a love child and sent it wandering through the American South. That may sound playful, but it is close to the truth. Kahnle has always loved the clean confidence of modern painting and the heightened, emotionally exact artificiality of classic cartoon backgrounds. Both understand that a landscape can be stylized and still feel completely real. The Curve of the Current marks an important new turn in his works.