PRESENTATION: Antone Könst-Cuttings
Antone Könst uses painting, sculpture, and glyphic tablets to depict experiences in light, and the latent potential within everyday moments, with deep roots in modern art history and a passion for oriental philosophy. These works of mythic and folk images come to represent the power found in quotidian rituals. Through recollections of daily walks in a park, a ballad to the moon, or odes to faith, Könst shares with us the aspects of the banal that are in fact the most captivating.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Marianne Boesky Gallery
Antone Könst’s approach begins with a trope. Compelled on some personal level, an image sticks with him; a juggler, a monkey, a goat, a flower. The familiar and at times cliché images, which are informed by archival sources and pop culture references, are altered and reimagined to suit the variety of mediums in Könst’s practice. A juggler becomes a repeated idea, pulling into its orbit the movements of the sun, the stillness of time, the birth of a child. Antone Könst’s solo exhibition ‘Cuttings” features a new group of flower paintings, a recurring motif that has appeared throughout the artist’s diverse painting practice. Known for his critical embrace of archetypal imagery, Könst’s work subverts expectations through total engagement with the image and object, invigorating enduring visual tropes with an infusion of wit, love, and formal invention. Cuttings, a new series of large-scale demonstrative flower paintings, is the artist’s deepest commitment to a single motif yet. Composed from reference photographs taken by the artist over the last year combined with sources from popular culture and art history, Könst roots each bouquet of oversized blossoms in animated vessels. The result embodies a range of psychological states that shift throughout each composition’s many expressions. Könst, whose family has been growing cut flowers in the Netherlands for generations, created this body of work while reflecting on philosopher Emanuele Coccia’s idea that the form of the flower is a “laboratory of conjunction”, a space where disparate things—memories, emotions, motivations, temporalities, and aesthetics in this case can coexist. This framework extends beyond the conceptual in the artist’s studio practice, as evidenced by the range of styles, marks, textures, and hues present in each painting. “I wanted the paintings to function as flowers in a way, to employ all the subtle surprises that characteristically extroverted flowers contain” said the artist. Just as a flower grows, vibrant with its own purpose, Könst’s paintings are both effusive and enigmatic, simultaneously bold and delicate, radiating a playful and dynamic energy that has the ability to engage with the viewer in a kind of cross-pollination.Antone Könst was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1987. Könst currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from The California Institute for the Arts, Valencia, CA in 2011 and received his MFA from the Yale School of Art, New Haven in 2014. In 2018 Könst received the Socrates Sculpture Park Emerging Artist Fellowship. He received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant in 2017 and the Fondation des Etats-Unis Fellowship. Paris, France in 2014.
Photo: Antone Könst, Tiger Lilies (detail), 2021, oil on canvas, 78 x 60 inches, 198.1 x 152.4 cm, © Antone Könst, Courtesy the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery
Info: Marianne Boesky Gallery, 509 West 24 Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 6/1/2022- , Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://marianneboeskygallery.com
