Alex Kanevsky

Painter Alex Kanevsky captures movement and time’s constant flow in canvases that resist adherence to a single moment, or even a single reading. Like the unreliable nature of memory and the imprecise atmosphere of poetry, Kanevsky’s multilayered works provide more questions than answers. These paintings combine abstraction and figuration in layered, painterly compositions in which the artist strives to convey his own particular view of the world with clarity.

Kanevsky describes himself as a slow painter who nevertheless works quickly to maintain a fresh approach to the canvas. His process of painting, rubbing out, and painting over was developed over many years and holds the key to the emotional richness of his work. This creates a kind of palimpsest, in which past iterations and experimentations remain visible beneath the topmost layer of paint. Though Kanevsky paints both from life and from photographs, he relishes most the kinetic energy of live models. He often works with the same models for years at a time, developing a strong sense of their individual form and motion. The figure is central to Kanevsky’s work. They inhabit mysterious landscapes and ambiguous architecture, often composed of wide swaths of color that contain echoes of color field painting. Most often, he focuses on the nude, creating soft, tactile bodies in luscious flesh tones.

Kanevsky was born in Russia in 1963, where he studied theoretical mathematics at Vilnius University in Lithuania before coming to the United States in the early 1980s. He settled in Philadelphia and began painting classes at the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in 1989. After receiving a Pew Fellowship in 1997, Kanevsky was able to devote himself to painting full time, and from 2002 to 2017, he served as an adjunct painting instructor at PAFA. He was awarded the Ballinglen Arts Foundation residency in Ireland and has served as a judge at many juried exhibitions worldwide. The artist has had over twenty solo shows, and has exhibited his work throughout the United States, Canada, France, Italy, United Kingdom, Spain, and Ireland. He lives and works in New Hampshire.