KAREN KITCHEL | Palindrome

“These new works reflect my long-term commitment to use classic landscape painting techniques and imagery to challenge classic landscape painting. I am not painting landscapes; I am landscaping paintings to challenge what was seen before, with what I am painting now.

I am loyal to the way fragmentary views layer one another to reveal landmark-quality place, but without confirming any location or point of view. The absence of any such point is crucial to testing the point of view.

The large, doubled images echo reflections in a mirror, or a child’s View-Master toy, or the near perfect duplications on a calm surface of water.

Formatting with tight cropping, incremental location shifts, and repetitions provide cinematic space for remembering, retracing, surveying the self in place and surveying the landscape of the self.”

This is landscaping painting.

- Karen Kitchel

In her eighth Robischon Gallery solo exhibition, Karen Kitchel’s dedication to her beloved series of grassland paintings abides an ever-expanding embrace of her chosen subject. Her signature works observe and examine the deep expanses of plant species, geography, and time. The concept, which began in 1997 to consider non-romanticized landscape views, continues today with enduring success. The intricate collection of native and invasive plants breaks with stubborn artistic traditions of grandeur but the artist’s cropped, sharply focused images on canvas and panel embody the seductive physicality of the paint itself while rejecting conventions of the horizon line, panoramas, grandiose scale, or a lofty "god's eye" view.

For “Palindrome,” Kitchel entwines the verbal concept of something reading the same backwards or forward with her well-recognized, highly disciplined painting language. The high-colored, mirrored image, paired paintings of Double Arch, Double Flow and Double Casitas use a hand-painted “reflection” image with a recognized resonance to the idea of a palindrome. Curiously, Kitchel’s rebellion against the convention of a horizon line is turned on its head with the space between the mirrored images becoming, for her, a sort of vertical horizon line which runs counter to the traditional, organizational custom, and repositions the viewer deeply into her lavishly rendered images. With this approach, Kitchel subverts the standard landscape viewing position that banishes the viewer to a distant and removed viewing location.

For the “Gesture” series paintings, the artist returns to the common but visually dynamic invasive species of Cheatgrass as her subject. Actively layered, each panel elevates the specimen’s downy, drooping bromes above its reviled station as a plant that typically inhibits the viability of grazing throughout the intermountain West and beyond. Kitchel’s “Looking for Water in Patagonia” series, a response to the artist’s international travels where the discovery of grass meant precious water may be near, invokes her much-admired “American Grasslands” series that is often on view at the Denver Art Museum.    

Karen Kitchel’s intimate views elevate the disregarded and overlooked in plain sight. Her paintings act with intent to connect and contrast contemporary realities to an earlier time and the history of landscape painting.

Karen Kitchel has a B.A. from Kalamazoo College and an M.F.A. from Claremont Graduate University. Her work is in numerous permanent collections, both nationally and internationally, including the Denver Art Museum, Palm Springs Art Museum, Tucson Museum of Art, The National Museum in Poland, United States Department of State Art Embassies Program, Joslyn Art Museum, Nicolaysen Art Museum, Pomona College Museum of Art, Ucross Foundation, Whitney Western Art Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center for the West, Children’s Hospital of Denver, and the University Museum of the University of Colorado, Boulder, among others. The ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Nicolaysen Art Museum in Casper, Wyoming, presented Kitchel’s retrospective entitled “A Relative Condition: The Landscape Paintings of Karen Kitchel” which brought together paintings from Kitchel’s cohesive, thirty-plus year career as a unique artist of the Western landscape. Additionally, she has exhibited at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Heritage Art Museum, Riverside Art Museum, Carnegie Art Museum, Claremont Museum of Art, Autry National Center for the American West, Wildling Museum of Art and Nature, and the California Capital Building, among many others.