Massimo De Carlo announces the exclusive representation of Dennis Kardon

MILAN.-Massimo De Carlo announced that the gallery is now exclusively representing the artist.

Dennis Kardon (USA, 1950 – lives and works in New York) is a graduate of Yale University, took part in the Whitney Independent Study Program, and was a student of Chuck Close and Al Held.

For several decades, Dennis Kardon has been experimenting with painting’s ability to encompass the spectrum between abstraction and hyperreal representation. With an almost hallucinatory power, Kardon treats the surface of his canvases as a field with various properties of reflection or distortion, resulting in a narrative that seems to have been disrupted by an unexpected event. Kardon’s examination of the human figure digs into the psyche contradicting stereotypes and preformed ideas. The artist’s whimsical tone serves to pervade his paintings with a discomforting feeling of familiarity: whatever you recognize is never exactly as you remember it to be. Critical comparisons have been made to David Lynch, for the ability to find the gothic in the every day, and to John Currin (who had a neighboring studio in the mid 90s). Pervaded with a sense of untouchable intimacy, Kardon’s canvases are “generously painterly, voluptuously creepy narrative pictures of familial conflict, sexual angst and infantile yearning”, as Ken Johnson wrote in the New York Times in 2004. Moreover the endless intellectual challenge of Kardon’s practice has led him to counterbalance his painting with powerful writing and critical skills allowing him to become a highly respected contributor to several art publications.

Dennis Kardon has widely exhibited in the United States and beyond, and his work is part of public collection such as, among others, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the New Museum, the National Museum of American Art in Washington D.C., the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Future upcoming projects include “Painting is Painting’s Favorite Food,” a collective exhibition curated by Alison Gingeras with Adam Lindemann and Amalia Dayan in the Hamptons this summer. Dennis Kardon will also be presented by Massimo De Carlo at Art Basel Online Viewing Room, as well as in Vortic London Collective (with Matthew Monahan), an online initiative to be inaugurated at the end of the month of June – which will mark the first collaboration between the gallery and the artist.