Kirsten Everberg | The Wall Street Journal
By Katherine Clarke
As a Capricorn, John McIlwee considers himself a spiritual person. But when his psychic told him in late 2021 that he was going to buy another house, he didn’t believe it. McIlwee and his husband, entertainment executive Bill Damaschke, already owned a portfolio of three architecturally significant California homes, and they’d decided not to take on any more projects.
Kirsten Everberg | KCRW Art Talk | by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp
Every day we learn — and experience — more about climate change with 300 animal and many more plant species now considered endangered just in California. Overwhelming realizations such as this are increasingly taken on by artists. The ideas are addressed in a quite personal way in a show of new paintings by Kirsten Everberg at 1301 PE in the mid-Wilshire district. The glossy pictures are so lush, their message might take a few moments to absorb. Birds and snakes, insects and flowers are painted in her trademark oil and enamel on panel, a medium that is shiny and vibrant.
The title of the show, Life Still, offers more than one meaning. This is life at this moment, life that is holding still but also still here. La Graciosa (2019) is an arrangement of lavender thistles and blooms is set before a yellow wall and window to the outdoors, where a ferret looks in. Grasshoppers are coupling under a blossom. A winning hand of cards lays on the table to emphasize the role of chance. (Very appealing cards of the artist’s unique design.)
This and other still lives were arranged by the L.A.-based artist who received her undergraduate and graduate degress in art from UCLA. They are set up in her architectural home, designed by Barbara Bestor, in Silverlake. They are intimately observed but they come from a lengthy lineage of art, especially the Golden Age of Dutch painting in 17th century. Artists chose flowers from different seasons of the year to symbolize the brevity and beauty of existance. Such paintings are called vanitas because they symbolize transcience and transcendence, the vanity of looking for internal, spiritual sustenance in the temporal assets of wealth or fame.
In the past, this referred to the lives of people, encouraging the search for faith in their time. Everberg’s asks us to consider our impact on the lives of animals and plants, whose survival as species is dependent on our behavior.
Rather than linger on that depressing thought, we can look to the painting themselves with their carefully integrated areas of color that puddle and swirl like liquified jewels yet coalesce as studies of nature within the context of daily life.
In this and other paintings, the animals are not portrayed in their actual proportions. Bugs are big, animals small. The effect is a bit jarring but accomplishes the desired result, making us look more closely for other clues to meaning.
Everberg brings us vanitas paintings for our times with a broken glass as fragility, a butterfly perched on a split pomegranite as a token of sundered faith. She is hardly the only contemporary painter to be returning to the still life traditions. Known for her past paintings that integrated memory and present reality, often within in architectural interiors, she now asks us to look at the present before it becomes our irretrievable history. The show continues through June 29.
Kirsten Everberg, "Paper Birch Grove (NYT)", 30 x 22 inches, oil and enamel on paper, 2018.
Rirkrit Tiravanija, "untitled 2018 (the days of this society is numbered may 21, 2018)", 24 x 22 inches, newspaper and enamel paint, 2018.
Saturday, June 23, 2018 at Neuehouse, Hollywood
6121 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90028
1301PE is pleased to announce artists Kirsten Everberg and Rirkrit Tiravanija will both be contributing works to Angel Art, a contemporary art auction benefitting Project Angel Food.
Project Angel Food's mission is to feed and nourish the sick as they battle critical illness. Volunteers and staff cook and deliver nutritious meals, free of charge, to homes throughout Los Angeles County to alleviate hunger, prevent malnutrition and return their clients to health.
Kirsten Everberg, Studio, Gaeta (after Twombly), 2015, Oil and enamel on wood panel, 24 x 24 inches
museum Dhondt-Dhaenens
Museumlaan 14
9831 Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium
Saturday, September 2nd, 2017
Annual Garden Party
On Saturday, September 2nd, 2017 the museum Dhondt-Dhaenens organises the eleventh edition of its annual Garden Party. The successful Paddle8 auction and the Christie's live charity auction are assured to be the highlights of this happening yet again.
Market, 2017, Oil and enamel on canvas over wood panel, 183 x 228,5 cm
Kirsten Everberg
Galerie Eric Hussenot, Paris
22 April - 3 June 2017
Exploring the complex relationships between culture, history and place, Kirsten Everberg applies the framework of distinct ethnic neighborhoods in Los Angeles to create a new body of work, using the concept of Chinatown as a jumping off point.
PARIS INTERNATIONALE
19–23 October 2016
51, avenue d'Iéna, 75116 Paris
1301PE is pleased to participate in Paris Internationale. We are presenting works by Fiona Banner, Fionna Connor, Kirsten Everberg, Judy Ledgerwood, Jorge Méndez Blake, Ana Prvački, Blake Rayne, Diana Thater and Pae White.
Continuing the sentiment of its inaugural edition, Paris Internationale's 2016 edition will take place at 51 Avenue d'Iéna Paris, a hôtel particulier built in 1897, most notably known as the Parisian residence and salon of prominent art collector Calouste Gulbenkian. From October 18th to the 23rd, the four story mansion, which spans over 3,000 m2, will host 60 participants including 53 galleries and 7 project spaces hailing from 19 countries. Echoing the plural identities of the participants, the building will feature a mosaic of rooms with strikingly specific characteristics. Responding to the current climate of art fairs in regards to both its production and reception, Paris Internationale is a joint initiative from 5 emerging galleries; Crèvecoeur, High Art, Antoine Levi, Sultana and Gregor Staiger, as a collective attempt to develop an appropriate model for fostering new advanced initiatives in contemporary art.
http://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/art-talk/art-of-war-and-peace
"The exhibition of paintings of LA-based artist, Kirsten Everberg, at 1301 PE Gallery will slow you down and put you in a quiet, meditative mood. Everberg traveled to Sweden to the remote island of Faro, where famous film director, Ingmar Bergman, lived for most of his life. Inspired by the architecture and interior of his house, she created a series of oil and enamel paintings, abstract and representational at the same time. The pale light of Nordic White Nights fills the rooms. Everything looks realistic, but strangely mysterious. Stepping close to the paintings, one discovers the elaborate texture of individual brushstrokes, as if enamel and oil are still wet and continue to slowly drip down the canvas"
"One large painting offers a glimpse of Bergman's library, with hundreds of books cramming the shelves. Each book is created by a single brushstroke" at least that is the impression one gets. And this multitude of books and exquisite brushstrokes makes one dream about Bergman's Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Cries and Whispers, and Fanny and Alexander"
http://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/art-talk/art-of-war-and-peace
Alex has chosen the painting on the left
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.
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1301PE is open during ALAC.
1301PE is pleased to participate in Art Los Angeles Contemporary.
We are presenting works by Jan Albers, Fiona Banner, Uta Barth, Kirsten Everberg, Ann Veronica Janssens, Jorge Méndez Blake, Jorge Pardo, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Pae White, and Paul Winstanley.
If you would like additional information, please contact us at info@1301pe.com