Kevin Teare: Bumpology, the Clinton Years

Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Kevin Teare. Teare admits to a perhaps unhealthy level of preoccupation with covert U.S. history, English rock bands from the 60s, and other matters pop or political. You wouldn’t immediately know it to look at his paintings—gorgeous abstract compositions of shape and color floating on pale expanses of primed canvas—but titles like There Are Exactly 57 Reds (for John Frankenheimer), which alludes to both a notorious quotation from Senator Joe McCarthy and to Frankenheimer’s film The Manchurian Candidate, suggest that Teare’s paintings are operating on other levels besides those immediately apparent.

Teare’s fascination with an issue or event is usually the conceptual point of departure as he starts a new painting. He may even include signifying text on the canvas as he begins, but in working he gradually effaces all that is verbal and so as to expunge from the painted space any outside references or editorial agendas. Somehow though, all this mental activity remains encoded in the painting; an invisible but palpable ghost in the machine enlivens the physical traces that remain on the canvas.

Teare has acknowledged the influence of Cy Twombly on his work. Twombly’s dense thickets of indecipherable marks often look less like brushstrokes than scrawled handwriting and he frequently takes his titles from classical texts or ancient mythology. Teare’s precisely rendered shapes of color also allude to language in that they seem to be glyphic characters from some private alphabet while his titles refer not to Virgil but to a kind of popular mythology composed of Beatlemania, the Kennedy assassination, and other epoch-making events of the past 50 years. As with Twombly, a great part of the interest in Teare’s painting derives from the tension he creates between the suggestion of translatability and his ultimate refusal to divulge specific meanings. Their significance is not in any literal interpretation, but in the way that painting is used to process experience into something beyond words. For Teare, painting is a way of addressing himself to ideas and issues without the limitations of language. “The end,” he says, “is often open.”

Kevin Teare lives and works in Sag Harbor, NY. His first exhibition was at The Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1975 and at the age of 25 he was awarded a National Endowment Fellowship for painting. Since then he has exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. Also an accomplished musician, Teare played drums in the seminal No-Wave band, MX-80. In 1999 he released a record entitled The List of Who Lives, which MOJO Magazine called “one of the three or four best self-produced albums of the millennium.” Besides Teare, the record features such guest performers as Wayne Kramer (MC5) and Richard Lloyd (Television). Teare is a 2006 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Fellowship award for painting. An exhibition of his work entitled The Most High will show at Guild Hall in East Hampton, NY in the fall of 2009. For more information contact Glenn Horowitz Bookseller via email, info@GHbookseller.com, or phone, 631-324-5511.

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