Talking shop with Kim Foster
By Shane McAdams
From her early days in Soho on Crosby Street to her move to Chelsea in 1998, Kim Foster has garnered a reputation for exhibiting pared-down, elegant, mostly abstract works that remain challenging in spite of their raw visual appeal. Although she has her moments of esthetic extravagance such as in the vibrant abstractions of Jacques Roch, one usually thinks of a certain tonal elegance in relation to her exhibitions. The ink on Plexiglas, photo-based work of Sarah Leahy and the altogether beguiling mushroom paintings of Jim Toia exemplify Foster’s sepia-tinted eye for art.
Aside from showing tastefully rigorous two-dimensional work, Foster has a penchant for obsessive and eccentric sculpture. Sydney Blum’s whimsical tangles of colorful wires arrest viewers’ attention as certainly as E.E. Smith’s knots of vines linger in their memory. And, Kwang-Young Chun, Foster’s most internationally recognized artist, astounds on all levels. His intricate agglomerations of small geometric blocks wrapped in lettered mulberry paper are mesmerizing. And, to their credit, they go beyond mere sensationalism, generating an interesting dialogue between the visual field and the individuality of its component parts.
There aren’t many galleries around anymore that can boast something approaching a unified “look.” The need to diversify their inventories and cast a wide net for potential collectors has led to an increasing eclecticism in New York art galleries. Kim Foster, while she has her anomalous artists who keep her viewers on their heels, is one of the few gallerists that can still make the claim of having a coherent stable of artists.
I asked Mrs. Foster this week what’s on her cultural radar lately.
Diane Samuels
Diane is an incredible artist I’ve represented for years, but because of the nature of her art, this is only the fifth exhibition I’ve had of her work. The current installation features a 40-foot table depicting the alley in Pittsburgh that she lives on. The piece has taken 10 years and is INCREDIBLY involved. There are over five thousand individual tiles comprising the image and, what can I say, the labor investment alone deserves our applause. But it’s also powerful on an emotional level. All the things that she’s collected from the alley, blades of grass that have squeezed through cracks, trash, coins — they work to paint a nostalgic picture of the artist’s relationship to her home.
Kwang-Young Chun
He’s one of our most recognizable artists. His work is well known throughout the world, and is truly distinctive, so people see it once and it imprints itself. This is the first time we’ve shown his sculptural work along side his paintings, and I was very excited about that opportunity. The barrier has always been transporting them — they’re made in Korea and they’re very fragile, so getting them back and forth can cause some problems. But the show has been very successful. It was all worth it.
Sarah Leahy
Sarah makes these really spare ink paintings on Plexiglas of photo-based imagery. The negative areas of the image are left transparent so the wall ends up being an integral part of the composition. It’s amazing how dense they feel against the wall versus how airy and minimal they actually are. There’s just not a lot of material there. So many artists create by building, building, building up; Sarah lets the material do the building for her.
Berlin
This past summer was the summer of Berlin for me. I spent an extended stay there to check out the art scene that everyone’s been talking about. It was well worth it. Berlin reminded me of what Soho was like before it was filled with boutiques. I went to dozens of smaller galleries, but what really struck me was how generally bohemian it was. Our hotel was filled with art; the hotel bar was playing video art; the DZ Bank building; the holocaust memorial by Peter Eisenman — it was all so alive, and, can I say, “arty.” At first I didn’t pay much attention to the hype about Berlin. I wanted to see it without any preconceptions, but based on what I saw, the hype is deserved.
Two Movies about Magic and Two about Female Royalty
The thing about running an art gallery is that you get really busy with your own projects and kind of need to decompress when you lock the doors at night. So lately I’ve been going to more movies than galleries. I saw two movies about magic: “The Illusionist” and “The Prestige” and two about queens: “Marie Antoinette” and “The Queen.” Go see “The Illusionist” and “The Queen,” although Sophia Coppola’s movie is visually astounding.
Kim Foster Gallery is at 529 West 20th St., 212-229-0044, www.kimfostergallery.com.
