Details:
① Artwork:
Lazare
This watercolor is part of an ongoing series exploring the development of spontaneous forms over time. He works over several weeks or months, pausing and returning to the paintings intuitively. Paint is repeatedly applied to the small surface, forging and fusing gestures into a layered symbology. Like an ecstatic Rorschach test, Kohler’s kaleidoscopic figures emerge from imperfect symmetries.
Drew Kohler is preoccupied with the material possibilities of paint and its potential for imbuing a work with an almost mystical physicality. There’s a queer energy to his use of color: the potential for interactions is nearly limitless, and Kohler takes his pleasure in unexpected combinations that build into sly scenes populated with figures from his subconscious.
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③ Artist:
Drew Kohler’s process is slow and intuitive. Some of his work is the result of just a few months of meditative attention, yet he has been revisiting and reworking others for years. Kohler applies layers of oil paint, sanding away portions here and there, and paints over them again, gradually building up a palimpsest of beguiling forms and figures. Like the painter Milton Resnick, whom he counts as a profound influence, Kohler is preoccupied with the material possibilities of oil paint and its potential for imbuing a work with an almost mystical physicality—yet with a kaleidoscopic joy alien to Resnick.
Drew Kohler was born in 1991 in Voorhees, NJ, and lives in Brooklyn, NY. He holds a BFA in painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, PA.
He presented his first solo exhibition, The Invert, 2012-2023 at MARCH in New York, NY (2023) and has previously exhibited at John Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York, NY, Zürcher Gallery in New York, NY, and Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia, PA, among others.
Kohler’s work is in the permanent collections of the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia, PA, and the Peter Bullough Foundation in Winchester, VA, where he was an artist-in-residence from 2015 to 2016.
