Karen Kitchel : Natural Order: Notes for an Opera

Robischon Gallery is pleased to present the third solo exhibition of paintings by Karen Kitchel. In this new series of oil on panel works, Karen Kitchel continues her highly-complex examination of landscape fragments while also expanding the potential for their contextual and narrative implications. As in grand opera, Kitchel's paintings employ technical virtuosity and visual excess to transform common experience to dramatic spectacle.

Kitchel dismantles and paints the nuances of a nearly monochromatic locale. The modest details of the commonplace which Kitchel selects from this understated, high plains landscape suggest the grandest of themes. Universal questions are considered in the work regarding the relationship of predator and prey and endless cycles of life and death.

This body of work expands upon the extensive, encyclopedic-style painting projects that Karen Kitchel has created for the past ten years, while continuing to allude to the fragmentation and disruptions inherent to the landscape itself. In the place of scenic vistas common in conventional landscape painting, her composite works both acknowledge and challenge our modern desire for a seamless, pastoral landscape bridging to past bodies of work including "Train Track Walks" and "East Meets West."

"Natural Order: Notes for an Opera" extends a complex domestic/global narrative to her signature, multi-part landscape paintings. With the concurrent, group exhibition "Landscapes of Colorado," this new series provides one artist's uniquely thoughtful and in-depth view exploring landscape as subject.