100 x 80 inches
Brigitte Mulholland is thrilled to present Kevin Lowenthal’s first solo exhibition in Paris, Dream house, opening Friday, 13 February. The exhibition is comprised of eight new paintings, as well as a new sculpture. Each of the works represents various curtains: creating, hiding, and slowly revealing the many stages and layers (both physical and metaphorical) on which the show plays out. It includes two of the artist’s largest works to date: a pair of paintings that depicts the left and right curtains of a stage: each their own individual work, but also here displayed as a diptych. Lowenthal’s practice is rich with nuance: evoking a space, an abstraction, a landscape – and with nods to the mythological, cultural, theatrical, and psychological ways in which the curtain shapes our world.
The curtain has deep mythic and cultural significance. Most prominent in our society is perhaps the climactic scene in The Wizard of Oz film, where Toto the dog finally yanks back the curtain, exposing that the Great Wizard of Oz is a fraud: a con man whose ruse is hidden only by a large piece of fabric. Lowenthal thinks about this often, and how it beautifully explains how violent and fragile the membrane between knowing and not knowing is; and how fundamentally critical it is that it is the dog who does that unveiling in the story – the notion that it is actually so easy to see a truth, a dog could (and did) do it.
Theatricality naturally plays a large role in the works: the setting of the stage, the framing of the stage, the grand revealing in the lifting of the curtain; and the finality of the curtain descending to finish a story. Three large paintings in the exhibition, for example, evoke left, center, and right stage – a way to envelope the viewer. This can also mirror the arc of a play: the rise, framing, and fall of the curtain. In these works, Lowenthal deploys brutalistically simple rectangular shapes in singular colours to ground the abstract gradients of slightly surreal curtains above, which are portrayed in dizzying arrays of colour and pattern. Digging deeper, the craggy cotton texture of the paintings, and the layers that are (literally) pulled from the surface in these spaces, also create a kind of landscape. The stage becomes the earth – a stark horizon line as an indicator – and curtains as the hazy, ever changing sky above. Looking towards the firmament, the tears in the curtains allow the viewer to see beyond and through, into another world.
In the middle of the gallery, Lowenthal presents a sculpture: a doll house whose exterior is decorated with meticulously placed bricks. In discovering the back of the work, rather than a traditional interior of miniature rooms and furniture, Lowenthal reveals a brightly-curtained stage. Traditionally, the Victorian dollhouse was used as a way for an affluent family to make an architectural model of their property: a sculpture of a house that contains a theater of meticulously staged replicas. Lowenthal here crafts his own modern version, and nods to a particularly timeless childhood tradition, wherein the home is often the first place a child performs. Digging even further psychologically, the theatre of the home can also be a place to explore a performative identity.
The nuance in Lowenthal’s work and the layered messaging can harken back to an ancient Greek story, that of the painters Zexius and Parrahesius, who challenge each other to a painting competition. Zexius paints a still life of grapes so realistically that crows come down and peck at the painting – his trompe l’oeil thus proven to be so wildly successful that it even fools the smartest birds. Parrahesius then brings his opponent to his studio to show him his painting, and Zexius attempts to pull back a curtain to enter – but that curtain is actually the painting that Parrahesius has made. He is thus declared the winner, for his ability to fool humans. While the myth seemingly simply favors the intelligence of humanity over that of animals, on a deeper level it mirrors the messaging and mystery that Lowenthal seeks in his work: what is it that we are seeking behind the curtain?; what are we trying to hide and reveal, in both the outward and inward?; and what are the infinite multitudes and complexities that can be contained in the stages and spaces on which we perform?
