Max Kozloff
“The Atmospherics of Interruption”
New York, 535 West 22nd Street
DC Moore Gallery displays for the first time an exhibition of paintings by noted art and photography critic Max Kozloff. Kozloff has long been highly regarded as a writer who also makes art. He has exhibited his color photographs at Holly Solomon Gallery, Marlborough Gallery, Steven Kasher Gallery, and most recently at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013 in the exhibition Max Kozloff: Critic and Photographer. Almost completely unknown until now, Kozloff has maintained a private practice as a creator of intense, moody, and nuanced paintings. Twenty-three works will be on view in Max Kozloff: The Atmospherics of Interruption: Paintings 1966-2018.
Kozloff developed his own pleasure in painting in the early 1960s, after many youthful visits to the Art Institute of Chicago and training at its school. His attachment to the brush was furthered by discoveries in the work of George Inness, Philip Guston, Cy Twombly, and Pierre Bonnard, whose achievement was the subject of his Master’s thesis at The University of Chicago. Kozloff’s approach to painting has always involved a fascination with the primacy of color. When a life change occurred, it transformed his method and compositions. As the artist has written:
““A physical condition inflected the course my painting was to take: a severe hearing disability. To compensate for this drawback, I intimated the idea that brushstrokes, marks and touches could have a musical import, as they are elaborated in an indefinite space. The body language of clouds came to inhabit that space, where faces sometimes appear, faces which I allowed and retained but did not intend.” ”
This new approach of atmospheric mark making is reflected clearly in the suite of four paintings in the exhibition inspired by the changing seasons. Rococo Spring (1998), presents curvilinear shapes resembling a human head and flowers in the central part of the canvas, amassed by layer upon layer of saturated, opaque colors that burst off the composition. Blue Probes Winter (1998) is a symphonic haze of pink and blue, framed by swaths of deep yellow, with subtle hints of abstracted foliage visible throughout the canvas.
Exhibition runs through January 26, 2019
