Naked Light, Anna Kunz
Galleri Urbane is delighted to welcome back Chicago artist Anna Kunz for her highly anticipated solo show, Naked Light. Completed in 2022, this series of paintings asks viewers to experience the warmth of light, represented by color, as a purveyor of society. These paintings galvanize conversation between both viewers and color upon canvas while confronting the emptiness and lack of connection from physical distancing.
Kunz’s works are in conversation with one another, flowing variously embodied subjectivities through color. “…the edges of each form and color bleed into each other, so there are no real contained boundaries,” she says of her work, mirroring her pursuit of creating ephemeral spaces that disrupt contemporary social and material boundaries.
Kunz utilizes acrylic on canvas and oil on linen for Naked Light as mediums to express kinship and community, addressing solitary existence. Dry and water-soaked strokes create an amalgamation of feelings in each painting. Using planks to traverse the canvases splayed on the floor, she slowly layers one color of paint at a time to the entire body of work. She creates a dialogue between heavily coated, bold hues of paint with lighter layers that are less opaque. No section of a canvas appears to be touched only once — layering thought and feeling.
Upward Slope (2022) is a work of tessellated panels focused on Kunz’s pursuit of physical cohesion to adjoin unlike perspectives. The colors are performative for the viewer, displaying opportunity for various impressions from the help of light’s mutability.
Kunz’s work sits alongside that of artists using color to speak for tangible existence. It’s a contemporary collection that interweaves various communications between the physicality of rhythm found in the paint upon the canvas and choreography of growing solidarity in our muted society.
For the UT Southwestern Medical Center Clements Collection, Kunz further investigated performance of color in a commissioned series of seven panels. Living beyond the canvas, Kunz worked with Nina Sarin Arias on a ready-to-wear collection shown at New York Fashion Week A/W 2022.
Kunz has been an artist at Galleri Urbane since 2016 and is newly represented by Alex Berrgruen, NY.