Sweet Lorraine gallery presents the good minute goes, a solo exhibition of Elsie Kagan’s recent work on Friday, September 7th from 6-9pm.
Kagan’s work is grounded equally in the history of representative painting and in contemporary concerns with materiality and surface. She sifts through the history of western art to mine imagery that speaks to her in the present moment – and reinterprets its language to discover an enduring resonance.
These paintings expose the urgent and all-encompassing twin experiences of motherhood and of loss – each a vast and varied landscape of connection, isolation, ambivalence, joy, rage, and grief. Kagan is investigating the odd sense of time rushing by and simultaneously slowing to a standstill, creating subjects that hover between relic and living, both iconic and familiar. The sources for this work are quiet and tender Madonna and child sculptures and reliefs from the later Italian Renaissance, largely made of glazed terracotta.
These pictures break from the tranquility of the traditional Madonna and child, instead presenting us with images in which multiple mothers and children cascade through the compositions, their idealized embraces interrupted by abstraction, replication, and incompletion. The work harnesses the power of pictorial space and surface presence, testing the line between representation and abstraction. Kagan’s large works are physically active, corresponding with her arm span and the movement of her body. In counterpoint, the smaller works are more hushed and contained, emphasizing drawing and mimesis. Color takes center stage, pushing in surprising ways throughout the spectrum and the limits of pigment. The mark making ranges from truly spontaneous to painstakingly careful, alluding to the slippery quality of time itself and the search for that fleeting moment of true connection; that charged moment when paint is at once a smear and a set of eyes looking into yours.
To see more of Elsie’s work, visit her website at www.elsiekagan.net
Sweet Lorraine Gallery
183 Lorraine St. 3rd Floor (between Court and Clinton)
Brooklyn NY 11321
Take F or G trains to Smith and 9th street subway stop and walk south toward Red Hook; or take the R train to 4th Ave. and 9th St., turn right down 9th St. to Court St., and turn Left 2 blocks; or take B61 bus to the corner of Court St. and Lorraine St.
