Alex Kanevsky

Hollis Taggart is pleased to present Everything Twice, artist Alex Kanevsky’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition features a new body of work by Kanevsky that further develops his use of light, color, and gesture to suggest the fluidity and movement of time. Everything Twice will be on view on the first floor of Hollis Taggart from November 21 through December 28, 2024, with an opening reception on Thursday, November 21, from 5pm to 8pm. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, with an essay by renowned critic and poet John Yau.

Kanevsky’s paintings experiment with pushing the boundaries of traditional subjects such as the human figure, landscape, and still life. His works often take as a point of reference recognizable imagery – a particular pose of a model, corners of interiors, haystacks in the snow, historic artworks – which he then subjects to a multilayered abstraction that splinters and refracts them in space and time. The artist often works in a cool-toned, subtle palette reminiscent of Scandinavian cinema or celadon pottery, lending a sense of serene uncanniness to each composition.

At the core of the artist’s paintings is a palpable sense of pleasure he takes in transfiguring the world around him through painting. In his essay for the accompanying catalogue, John Yau noted how this sense of pleasure transfers to us as viewers, as we look at these paintings: “For me, one of the undeniable pleasures is both seeing and reflecting upon Kanevsky’s paintings, their buttery surfaces and resistance to narrative. Perhaps Kanevsky’s elusiveness is most strongly felt in his paintings of nude models, an academic subject if there ever was one. Despite this long and honored history, Kanevsky once again breaks new ground.” In The Battle of Shahbarghan (2024) for example - the largest of his recent paintings - the artist embeds a nude within his rendition of the original 17^th century Persian miniature of the same name, which is housed in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Though Kanevsky has retained the turbaned horsemen of the original miniature, he has stretched them out as if they were liquid and subordinated them to the large-scaled nude, who dominates the composition.

In capturing movement and time’s constant flow in his canvases, Kanevsky hints at how we ourselves and our realities are composed of series of moments, rather than any solid certainty. His paintings are imbued with a sensuous, fluid energy in which forms often meld into each other, and bodies bleed into their surroundings. Some compositions look as if they are glitching under Kanevsky’s hand, or struggling to emerge into being. Walls are sometimes not lined up properly with floors. The artist’s actual process, too, is inflected with such fluidity. He describes himself as a slow painter who must nevertheless work 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 process creates a kind of palimpsest, in which past iterations and experimentations remain visible beneath the paint. 

Born in Russia in 1963, Alex Kanevsky studied theoretical mathematics at Vilnius University in Lithuania before moving to the United States in the early 1980s. He settled in Philadelphia and began painting classes at the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts in 1989. After receiving a Pew Fellowship in 1997, Kanevsky devoted himself to painting full time, and taught at the Philadelphia Academy from 2002 to 2017. He has exhibited his work throughout the United States, Canada, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Ireland in over twenty solo exhibitions. He lives and works in New Hampshire.

For more information about Everything Twice, please contact us at info@hollistaggart.com or +1 212.628.4000.

For press inquiries, please contact Aga Sablinska at aga.sablinska@gmail.com or +1 862.216.6485.