Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Kevin Appel, on view from 16 March through 22 April 2023 at 525 West 22nd Street. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated digital catalogue featuring text by Molly Warnock.

Over the past decade, Appel’s work has explored the interplay of photography, printmaking, and paint. While earlier works veiled appropriated and original photographs with abstract forms, the present series abandons the demarcation of media for a synthesis of imagery. 

Beginning with photographs of architectural fragments, Appel takes the images through various stages of manipulation – scaled, cropped, translated to halftone – to arrive at a series of photo silkscreens that comprise the works’ constitutional vocabulary. Rejecting, however, the precision that printmaking typically provides, the artist utilizes denser acrylic and oil paints through the fine mesh, creating opportunities for material unpredictability and textural variation. Molly Warnock writes, “The images in these paintings interrupt themselves; they get in their own way. That Appel is very often working wet-into-wet, or at any rate wet-into-humid, is also to the point: the process is both additive and subtractive in one and the same gesture, the matrix pulling up paint as well as laying it down.”

The resultant works reverberate with texture, pattern, and depth born of accumulation. Through built up layers originating in photography, the paintings return to the gestalt of their architectural genesis as aggregate compositions, resting just shy enough of total abstraction. Time and close inspection reward the viewer with insights into the works’ constituent parts.