Home Magazine Silas Von Morisse Gallery presents: KES ZAPKUS - New Paintings

Kes Zapkus born in Lithuania in 1938, he lives and works in New York City.

He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, BFA 1960 and Syracuse University, then he continued to travel to improve his formation both in Paris and New York.
He has exhibited extensively internationally and his work is in prestigious collections in the USA and abroad notably: The Brooklyn Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, Joseph Hirshhorn Museum, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, M.I.T etc.

 

KES ZAPKUS  Feast of Veronese, 2015  Oil, acrylic on canvas 

 

Feast of Veronese is a painting composed of 2172 square elements, a tan-gray base with multicolor passages, which could conjure a measured fugue occurring in time-space.

 

"I would prefer for my work to first be seen in accord with my intentions for it.I believe my specific vision carries the prime expressive potential of my work and feel that this is the primary lens that it should be viewed through.The work should occupy the gaze of the viewer for an extended period of time, undergoing a process of consideration similar to that which I undertook when organizing the piece.It is the viewer’s subsequent right to give the work a life outside of this base of comprehension.(...)I believe I am not making objects, pictures, or societal symbols, signaling a departure from traditional painting aspirations where image, narrative, design, or process can be codified(…).I want to compose with a rich, visual language and a minimized pictorial function, allowing the painting to operate at the level of its basic human roots by becoming a testimonial to the emotions, the hand, present time, and careful consideration."

 From “Notes on my Painting” - Kes Zapkus

 

 

KES ZAPKUS, Middle East from Bosch's Inferno, 2016, Oil and acrylic on canvas

 
 

Middle East from Bosch’s Inferno refers to catastrophic terror and annihilation from crazed religious ideologies. Middle East should mean Medieval and implies an inferno like Bosch’s in present time. This big black painting with a white network grid suggests entrapment, the small color configurations remind of the monstrosities of superstition and self-alienation in a global world.

 

Silas Von Morisse Gallery presents the new solo exhibition of the artist Kes ZapkusNEW PAINTINGS as he approaches his 80th year.

On view at 109 Ingraham Street, Bushwick, Brooklyn, March 1 to 30, 2018. 

 

KES ZAPKUS: NEW PAINTINGS is a summary work, which expresses a lifelong investigation of deeply held beliefs concerning the essence of the historical Art of Painting.

His work is provocatively not pictorial, but similar to a structure made by a complex of elements and small units that are crossed simultaneously in a sense of wholeness.

The artworks in the exhibition appear as a re-visitation of ideals from his painting life.

 

 

KES ZAPKUS, Red Sea Ordeals in Cyberspace, 2017, Oil and acrylic on cotton

 

Red Sea Ordeals in Cyberspace is a humanistically political work with the Red Sea as a persistent focus of emotions, and strife from biblical times to the present. It is appropriately intense in red orientation for ‘ordeals’ and the term ‘cyberspace’ is to advance these centuries of angst into the digital and virtual codifications of today.