ART CITIES:N.York-Karel Funk
Karel Funk in his solo exhibition at 303 Gallery in New York showcases his unique ability to utilize a hyper-real painting style in creating visual and psychological abstractions. Karel Funk’s subjects demand close examination. Painted with uncanny precision, their vitreous flesh and micro-weave technical-wear draw the viewer in. On the other hand, they emit a cool inscrutability. Withdrawn beneath headphones and hoods, the sitters face enigmatically away, closing their eyelids as if to savour a precious solitude.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: 303 Gallery Archive
In a conscious inversion of portraiture’s traditional function, Karel Funk’s subjects are all seen from the back, swathed in hooded coats made of synthetic and technologically engineered materials. The subjects’ identities become anonymous, enveloped and displaced by their garments’ contours and colors. The paintings become purely formal, floating abstractions of light, shadow, and rippling fabrics which recall Renaissance and Flemish 17th Century portraiture. As the artist says “There’s two sources of inspiration for my paintings, art historical references to Renaissance portraiture, which I love and also an urban experience where in a busy day if you’re downtown or on a bus or on a busy street corner, you’re very close to strangers. When you’re that close to a stranger, you can kind of see some intimate details, you know, the space behind their ear, maybe some dandruff on their shoulder. Those kind of daily experiences inform my work”. But while Renaissance masters mirrored the humanist values of their age, emphasizing facial expressions and personal style, Funk raises questions about individuality’s place in our current era. Stranded at oblique angles, lost in hi-fi, and rendered in plastic-based parkas with plastic-based paint, his subjects suggest the detached individualism of a globalized world. Funk’s sitters’ heads are often larger-than-life-sized, giving us a disorienting feeling of being too close and seeing too much of the people in question. Thus magnified, their earlobes, hair follicles, and imperfect skin take on a foreign, voyeuristic quality. This frisson of unreciprocated personal connection is exactly what the sitters seem to shy from, their thoughts focused elsewhere behind an armor of Gore-Tex and smart phones. Funk has compared his subjects to the people we find ourselves thrust up against in mass-transit. While such encounters are familiar to us all, never as explicitly as in Funk’s work are we given license to look. A master of vertiginous detail, the artist suspends us between feelings of closeness and remoteness, warmth and coolness, history and present-day.
Info: 303 Gallery, 555 West 21st Street, New York, Duration: 20/7-18/8/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.303gallery.com
