“A Relative Condition: The Landscape Paintings of Karen Kitchel”
January 22-April 14

In Karen Kitchel’s thirty-year painterly and conceptual exploration of land she investigates how we experience landscape, what we want from it, and our relationship to it.

Kitchel’s analysis of landscape is intensely personal, as well as a cultural taking to task. There is no yearning or nostalgia within pleasant, but distant mountain views in Kitchel’s work. Instead, it is rigorous, obsessive, technically stunning, analytical, and powerful. It is also, collectively, a decades long inquiry into what we ultimately value as a culture about its presentation and use. In her intimate paintings, Kitchel opens up a new experience of landscape.

She lets us see and explore the wildness in our backyards and focuses us on the human impact within the wild. In the three decades that Karen Kitchel has been painting contemporary landscape, she has been anything but detached from the land with its imprint of time and history. Her landscapes display and celebrate the various processes of invasive growth, change, and industry on the land. Additionally, she has subverted many of the visual customs that are so ingrained in the landscape tradition such as a horizon line, overblown pictorial scale, timelessness, and a breathtaking view.

Kitchel has taken great pleasure over the years in depicting the lack of horizon line, a diminutive scale, showing the human impact on land, incorporating time and history, and nurturing a grandeur in the mundane, scraggly tufts of undergrowth. Her paintings never let us forget that nature is shaped, viewed, developed, created, and destroyed by our culture and emotions. 

For more information about Kitchel, visit www.karenkitchel.com.