Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce Slice of Life, a solo exhibition of works by Kim MacConnel that will be on view in our Chelsea location from October 25 through December 21, 2024. This show marks the artist’s second with the gallery, his work having previously featured in the group exhibition Patterns (Summer 2024).
Slice of Life showcases a group of MacConnel’s seminal “bedsheet” paintings alongside a number of smaller gouaches on paper, which served as studies for the larger works. The presentation of this selection of works, all produced between 1978 and 1982, offers fresh insight into a key figure of the Pattern and Decoration movement. The cotton-sheeting base of the bedsheet pieces, painted with diluted acrylics and pinned to the walls as if they are positioned temporarily, bestows the works with a sense that they are floating visions that could dematerialize at any moment. MacConnel views this impermanence as a reflection of our current moment, chiefly the pressing issue of climate change and its anticipated effects over the coming decades.
MacConnel’s imagery is pulled from a range of sources — cartoonish "clip art" books from Hong Kong and the whimsical, bombastic aesthetics of the artist’s nine-year-old alter ego mingle with colors, patterns, and advertisement paintings inspired from the artist’s travels to places such as India and Mexico. When MacConnel created some of these works in the late 1970s, the process was both playful and provocative. In a manner akin to child’s game of “Battleship,” imagining various near-apocalyptic devastations like scenes from a Godzilla film, he combined a complex interplay of various associations — Nature, Science, Commerce, Religion. These elements remain as potent as ever despite how distant our current moment seemed when the works were originally created over 40 years ago. For MacConnel, the bringing together of these works after so many years highlights how quickly the future becomes present, and serves as a cautionary message from the past.
Kim MacConnel received a BFA in 1969 and an MFA in 1972 from the University of California, San Diego. He is one of the founding artists of the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s, and began showing with the Holly Solomon Gallery, NY in 1976. MacConnel has been included in numerous museum exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennials of 1975, 1977, 1979,1981, 1985; the Museum of Ghent, Belgium; MoMA PS1, New York; Contemporary Art Museum Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and many others. MacConnel’s work is in numerous public collections, including Buffalo AKG Art Museum; Brooklyn Museum; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles; Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen, Germany; Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, Logan; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Kim MacConnel lives and works in Encinitas, CA.
