The Resurgence of Beauty: The Art of Kathleen Kinkopf
Art is most difficult to define but it has always evoked the ideal, the beautiful, the aesthetic. That is until the last century. Even though Courbet and Monet in the mid-eighteen hundreds painted real verses the unreal subjects, the paintings displayed the mundane as heroic and worthy of a Salon exhibition. Art diverged from these standards with the rise of modernity - rising middle classes, ease of transportation, and communication, photography, art galleries, and auction houses - of the late 19th Century. Art became an Impression, then an Expression, and ultimately pure color and led to Abstract Expressionism/Action Painting of Rothko, Pollock and their colleagues. Yet still it retained a sense of the aesthetic, if only in the arrangement of line, color, and composition. The art world shifted once again and diverged further from the beautiful with the Combines of Rauschenberg and the targets, flags, and numbers paintings of Johns. Art even lost the object itself with the Conceptual Art of Sol Lewitt and others where the concept, the written instructions and words, became the art. No longer was beauty or the ideal a prerequisite. This reached its zenith with Installation or Earth Works Art wherein a pile of bricks is considered art because of the story behind the pile, the concept (and because it is located in an Art Gallery or Art Museum). Art continued on this path with toy like, almost kitsch figures of Murakami or the embalmed sharks of Hirst or the plastic and Lucite boxes of Judd which became "high art".
The art market proceeded similarly along these lines with astronomical price tags on this art facilitated by the money available from the tech boom and the hedge fund managers of Wall Street. The financial crises of late have dramatically slowed this seemingly inexorable path. Granted, many of these works continue to reach ever greater prices. There, however, is an undercurrent evolving, a subtle reversion to beauty, the ethereal, the aesthetic, the ideal. There has always continued a submerged focus on beauty, but it is now coming to the forefront.
One artist exemplifying this is Kathleen Kinkopf of Albuquerque, NM. Her earlier works were imbed with mythological references, often rendered in an almost Italian Surrealist manner with an overtone of almost graphic artist clarity. Her artistic evolution is to one of pure painting of beauty while maintaining the mystical and ethereal. Her more recent figurative paintings of Asian appearing women with their formalistic costumes and incorporation of three-dimensional ornamentation are stunning. But even more amazing are her horse portraits displaying the beauty and mystic character of these majestic creatures. They are in a class of their own. One stares at these paintings mesmerized by their ethereal beauty. Though realistically portrayed the emotional responses they evoke go well beyond the actual presentation of the animals themselves. They engage one in the almost supernatural qualities of the depiction. They speak to one's soul, one's desire for the ultimate beauty, and the ideal. These portraits supercede one's concept of the real and become super-real. Not paintings to view in passing but those which demand a prolonged analysis, evincing the innermost contemplation, almost an exercise in self hypnosis.
These paintings can be seen in many Southwest private collections as well as the local Lanning Gallery .
C. Lawrence Decker
Art Consultant
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