DAVID
KORTY
1 June-3 July 2004
In
his paintings of the urban landscape David Korty initially focused on
his native Los Angeles. His predilection in painting his home town was
for soft colours and a heightened sensual atmosphere. Marrying this palette
to delicate brushstrokes, the scenes acquire an ethereal quality, as Korty
explores the impact of light on the city’s streets, parks and buildings.
There is a sense of experimentation, a search for how best to convey the
peculiarities of the atmosphere, both in terms of ambience, but more specifically
in the climatic sense. This quest, together with the aesthetic, recalls
the innovations of the Impressionists, with their forays into pointillism
and whole series dedicated to exploring the impact of different light
conditions on the same scene. Korty’s landscapes also share the
Impressionists’ positive, celebratory approach towards the metropolitan
environment, as the industrial age dawned bringing with it a new prosperity
and a nascent leisure culture.
In his recent
landscapes Korty has begun to consider other cities, including Venice
and London. He has become emboldened too in his choice of colour, as he
paints with brighter and stronger tones. This, coupled with a freer application
of paint, adds warmth and a renewed vigour to the fundamental optimism
of these paintings. Figures remain, by and large absent, but where they
can be seen, scale dictates that they are anonymous miniatures, dwarfed
into insignificance by the majesty of their surroundings. In a monochrome
painting, where we peer through trees at rain-drenched, grey streets,
where cars file by, nose to tail, there is nonetheless a sense of the
dynamism of the city, once celebrated by the Futurists, along with the
energy of urban life. An energy that reaches the viewers as they are urged
into activity; for while the paintings are easy on the eye, devoid of
any jarring elements, the eye needs to work, to pick out the figurative
from the decorative and steadily absorb the atmosphere of the city.
David Korty lives and works in Los Angeles. He showed at HQ as part of
a gallery swap with China Art Objects, Los Angeles and then had a solo
show here in 2002. His work has been included in group and solo shows
in Europe and the U.S.
Sadie
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