NYAB Event - Kevin Fey “Color Unbound”

Kevin Fey “Color Unbound”

Underline Gallery

This event has ended.

UNDERLINE Gallery presents an exhibition of new works by artist Kevin Fey: “Color Unbound,” co-curated by Catherine Serrano.

‘Color Unbound’ brings together the newest series of abstract paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Kevin Fey in his first solo exhibition at UNDERLINE. Fey’s paintings draw attention to the subjectivity of color, the performativity of painting, and the relationship between site and vision. The colors that one encounters in each painting are in a sense, manufactured – their gradations forged through by the artist’s concentrated handling and knowledge of the material. Through pouring, heating, setting, and reheating, the weight of an applied color is captured by its darkened hue on the canvas, while lightness is recorded through negative space.

The eye has a tendency to create order out of chaos, familiarity amidst the uncommon. In “Color Unbound” any impulse by the eye to retrace the artists’ maneuvers are prevented by the sleek resin surface of each painting. Fey has applied and utilized the viscosity of this reflective surface to counteract how we customarily approach a painted work. As a result, we begin to engage with color in parallel with the external environment of each work, exercising the neurological side of vision. The experience of viewing each painting becomes an opportunity for an exchange between viewer and object within each site of display.

The reflection becomes two-fold, that which is sensed visually as surrounding light enters, bounces off, and interacts with the paintings, and that of your internal contemplation. The viewer is asked to participate or, perhaps, invest in the experience of abstraction. How might one’s observations change at a different time of day? How might one person interpret a color differently based on the moments leading up to entering the gallery space?

Similar to the multifaceted process taken in order to bring these objects into fruition, the paintings entice your prolonged reading. For the paintings presented as part of ‘Color Unbound,’ size, color, surface, and material are not only elements of abstraction but modes of information and signifiers of an occurrence.

Especially for this exhibition, Underline Gallery will collaborate with Mellow Pages, an independently-run library & reading room located in Brooklyn in order to provide a curated collection of books that explore the themes presented through “Color Unbound.” These books will be available for reading in the gallery for the duration of the exhibition.

[image: Kevin Fey, “Untitled (Cyan)”]