Opening Reception: Thursday, January 24, 2013; 6-8PM
January 24 – February 23, 2013
Stux Gallery is pleased to announce the fifth solo show of New York based Bulgarian artist Kosyo Minchev. Known for his provocative re-conceptualizations of classical painting and sculpture, Kosyo’s new group of works continue to demand awareness of history’s effects on our visual judgments, and challenge us to reconcile personal preconceptions and the necessity to pursue an informed consensus.
His “Lambs” series of aqua-resin lamb heads are docile, stately and gently mysterious. The lamb heads are not busts, but rather cropped sections that still carry an imaginary presence of the entire body. The pristine color and smoothness of the medium evoke classical tenets and a sense of timelessness, accentuating their fleeting innocence and our current society’s long departure from classical idealism. Abstract, geometric compositions occur throughout the series to propose a puzzling, co-dependent relationship between materiality and intangible thoughts.
Kosyo’s expressive marks record both fleshly fur texture and the gruesomeness of suffering, and distort the contour to transport the seemingly representational works to the realm of conceptualism and expressionism. Simultaneously, they inject human-like emotions that are quiet but intensely tangible. These lambs do not claim to simulate the human condition. Rather, the animal-nature resists blunt projections of our immediate personal understandings, and makes emotions we detect more fundamental and intimate.
Kosyo’s “Landscapes” paintings continue to negotiate the relationship between the artist, the medium, artistic subject matter and the overarching intellectual history. He paints inside silicone rather than over it, and creates images that could be stretched and molded along with its malleable medium. These paintings communicate with gravity and hang without the rigid integrity imposed by frames and canvas stretchers. They are deeply indebted to the Romantics’ majestic, sublime portraits of nature, but are soft and rubbery to the touch. The gestural brushwork is viewed through a transparent layer that filters out the three dimensional gustos of the brushstrokes and activates the viewer’s imagination. While the silicone cover denies unrestricted access to the painting inside, it initiates refreshing examinations of our default ways of seeing, the nature of painting and the course of art history.
Kosyo advocates for the necessity of labels and categories that aid our understanding of the visual world by creating works that confound these concepts -- his paintings map out the middle ground between the permanent past and the ephemeral present, the psychological and the universal.
Kosyo Minchev is a New York City based artist who was born in Bulgaria and studied at the National Academy of Fine Art in Sofia. He has shown throughout Europe and the United States including the Herringen Kunstverein in Germany, the Wittgenstein House in Vienna and the Queens Museum of Art in New York. Kosyo’s exhibitions have been reviewed in many publications including The New York Times; the Village Voice; Sculpture Magazine; Woxx, Zeitung vum Lëtzebuerger Vollek and D'Lëtzebuerger Land in Luxembourg; and KULTURA Newspaper in Russia. This will be his fifth solo show at the Stux Gallery, NY.
-Lucy Li
For further information please contact the gallery at Andrea@stuxgallery.com.
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