Galerie Maria Bernheim is delighted to announce their first solo show of American artist Kyle Dunn at their gallery in Zurich. This exhibition entitled ‘The Fool’ furthers the artist’s interest in the human form evolving within evocative landscapes.
This new group of work proposes a dialogue between two different media: his acclaimed bas-relief sculptures and paintings on wooden panels. Dunn’s paintings address the anxieties of the contemporary moment, with an emphasis on our relationship to the deteriorating natural environment and the contradictory ways we live in spite of this knowledge.
Several sets of contrasting paired works imply a swinging between extremes. In The Santa Anas, Dunn evokes the wind that comes down from the mountains in Southern California that heralds fire season and is rumored to cause madness; the flower represents an evil spirit receiving its energy from the orange fiery sky rather than the sun. Its pendant, Insomniac, shows a more meditative scene. Here the moon exerts a tidal-like gravity on a domestic interior where a sleepless figure lays awake, accompanied by the glow of his distracting smartphone. Elsewhere the yellow and red figures displayed as a diptych--The Fool pair--gleefully prance through apocalyptic landscapes, seemingly unaware of or indifferent to their surroundings. Towering over the landscape, they imply the Angel and the Devil sitting atop our collective shoulders, a Janus figure on two sides of the same coin, framing the exhibition as an introspective space.
The architectural elements and sceneries that punctuate each painting transform the gallery into a large landscape. The wild fires seem to be catching up with the protagonists, the lone rudimentary rural houses simultaneously evoking American expansion and decline. Instead of standing at the edge, the viewer is standing in an open field, observing the periphery, the outsiders, the forms and figures that cross over into our reality.
