Maw

Press Release

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present Maw, a project space exhibition with Brooklyn-based artist Kari Cholnoky.

With materials ranging from epoxy putty, faux fur, acrylic and puff paint, Kari Cholnoky makes paintings that straddle (and collapse) definition. They are accumulated, encased assemblages of synthetic materials, each surface built up in a slow, mutative process. As such, the painted, epoxied, and collaged flesh of Cholnoky’s paintings swells up in high relief and spills out beyond any formal frame. Maw presents a suite of smaller paintings by the artist, each work a dense articulation of color, texture, and images. They are at once caustic and sincere, compact and sinewy, and it is these tensions that drive the artist to render the entangled mess of the present.

At the center of Cholnoky’s Maw sits Megapainting (2021), a quadrupedal structure encrusted and blistered. Is it a bed, a gurney, a long-legged lawn chair? On top, strapped down on its back with head and knees elevated, a painting lays in technical repose. Cholnoky often works on the paintings from the top-down in a surgical manner, but here the painting is both body and table, a primordial mass that, despite its afflictions, seems to be growing in all directions. Megapainting has endless variation.

Kari Cholnoky holds an MFA in painting from Cranbrook and a BA from Dartmouth College. Recent solo exhibitions include Impending Moreness, Julius Caesar Gallery, Chicago (2021); Motherboard, Real Pain, Los Angeles (2020); and True Level, Safe Gallery, Brooklyn (2017). Recent group exhibitions include Theorem X/Y, Rachel Uffner Gallery and Mrs. Gallery, New York (2021); In Sickness and In Health, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York (2020); Cult of the Crimson Queen, Ceysson & Benetiere, New York (2020); and Wirrwarr, Anton Kern Gallery, New York (2019). Cholnoky attended the Worth Advisory Artist Residency in Bovina, NY (2019) and the Fountainhead Residency, Miami, FL (2017). The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.