2 June – 2 July 2016
Fiona Connor, Kirsten Everberg, Jorge Mendez Blake, Pae White & Paul Winstanley
Jan Albers, John Baldessari, Fiona Banner, Fiona Connor, Kirsten Everberg, Jorge Mendez Blake, Liliana Moro, Jorge Pardo, Jessica Stockholder, SUPERFLEX, Kerry Tribe, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Paul Winstanley & Pae White
Kirsten Everberg is a LA-based painter whose work explores the interplay between memory, fragmentation, photography, cinema and the subjective nature of perception. It is Everberg's seductive surfaces that first capture our gaze. Using a unique combination of oil and enamel paint, her works hover between representation and pure paint. There is always a tension here between the convincing depiction of space, and the abstract skeins of color that dance across the canvas. What appears to be an historic ballroom or dense jungle from far away, is reconfigured into glossy pools of paint close-up. Everberg's mastery of her medium is demonstrated by how deftly she walks this line. Narrative and image; truth and fiction; surface and what lies beneath – are all woven together in Everberg's captivating works.
Everberg graduated with a MFA from UCLA in 2004. In the same year, she had her first solo exhibition - at 1301PE - and was featured in Russell Ferguson's group exhibition 'The Undiscovered Country' at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Since then she has exhibited widely, amongst others at the Scottsdale Museum of Art; Pomona College museum of Art, Claremont, CA; FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; MOCA, Los Angeles.
Pomona College Museum of Art exhibition catalogue published on the occasion of Kirsten Everberg's Project Series 45 exhibition. "Kirsten Everberg: In A Grove" consists of a new suite of four paintings and four drawings based on her exploration of the Japanese crime drama Rashomon (1950) by filmmaker Akira Kurosawa.
Publisher: Pomona College Museum of Art
ISBN: 978-0-9818955-3-6
The exhibition at SMoCA was Everberg's first major solo exhibition in a U.S. museum. Featuring new and recent painting, the show marked the first cohesive presentation of the full scope of this significant and profound body of work. The catalog presents images of each painting shown in the exhibition and is accompanied with an essay by the curator, Cassandra Coblentz, titled Looking for Edendale, Evanescent Appearances in the Paintings of Kirsten Everberg.
Publisher: The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art
ISBN: 978-0-9798936-3-6
Alex McDowell, film production designer and producer, founder and creative director of 5D Global Studio, on a painting by his wife, Kirsten Everberg
GB Tell me why you chose this painting.
AM 'The Woodcutter' is one of a series of four paintings by my wife, Kirsten Everberg. I feel deeply connected to my wife's work. I've seen this incredible transition she made. She was a costume designer when I met her, working in film, and she decided that she wanted to go back to art school when we had our first child. So she literally went back to art school with Oonagh, our baby daughter on her hip. She was going to just dip in and then go back to costume but she realised she had found her life's work. Her process is unique. She projects images and paints in very thin oil while the canvas is vertical, then she lays it flat and drips liquid acrylic onto the surface. There's a constant tension between control and release. With this painting, what resonates for me is the notion of Kurasawa's non-linear narrative Rashomon, that this series of paintings is based on. Like the film, this painting speaks to me of multiple issues about narrative. That's kind of fundamental to what I'm doing nowadays. Then there's this idea that every story has rich, layered, interwoven time and space, and each lens you put on it gives you a different story. For this series she made four very similar looking paintings of the forest where the Rashomon story takes place. Each one represents a different character and each character has a different story outcome because of their different viewpoint. And then there is her process. The surface of this painting has this beautiful quality of shifting from the abstract to the figurative depending on scale. The closer you get to it, the more abstract it becomes, which I think makes your relationship to the painting very volatile. It changes completely as you move back and forth from something chaotic to something that has layers of figurative meaning. The things she's dealing with in memory and history are there for you if you stand back far enough to see it as something with a photographic source. Then as you get closer it becomes more about the paint and the materiality. That is a beautiful aspect but in this case it has extra layers of meaning with the Rashomon source.