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K Contemporary ✨✨✨✨✨

Since its inception, K Contemporary has made a name for itself by recontextualizing and informing the dialogue about how we experience art. This artist-centric gallery has a focus on contemporary and conceptual art, as informed by historical context, while providing its patrons with engaging exhibitions, pop-ups, art interventions and art fairs. Through these immersive and experiential displays, K Contemporary acts as a catalyst for engaging discussion about the role of contemporary art in society.

Whether our artists are exploring the complexity of American values, the subtle power of iconography, technical processes and materiality, personal histories, human connection, or contradiction and perception, ultimately all return to a similar conclusion: that art, no matter how it is rendered, provides a sanctuary for the soul.

Ya La'Ford - "CBS Saturday Morning"

Artist Ya La'Ford's work spans mediums. Her prints, sculptures and installations have been featured in the Venice Biennale and in private collections like the Gates Foundation. Michelle Miller met with her to see how it all takes shape. 

Ya La'ford (b. 1979; Bronx, NY) is a versatile artist, educator, muralist, and above all, a conduit between the visual realm and the intricate complexities of human communities. Working across a wide range of media including paint, sculpture, installation, video, and sound, she weaves layered meanings to engage with the universal language of art and create transformative experiences that inspire communal growth. La'Ford holds a Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts from The Art Institute of Boston, and she also earned a Juris Doctor from the University of Florida's Levin College of Law. As a first-generation American of Jamaican heritage, she gracefully navigates between her cultural roots and marginalized communities, utilizing the power of art as a medium of connection. 

Central to the artist’s mission is the creation of art and spatial experiences that profoundly revolutionize the social, cultural, and historical contexts of creative expression within the human journey. Her artwork has earned a place in esteemed permanent collections such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Vinik Family Foundation, Nike, Indy500, Grand Prix, the Rays, and Rowdies, and she was selected to create art for Super Bowl 55, held in Tampa. Notable institutions featuring her work in exhibitions include the Baker Museum, Tampa Museum of Art, Orlando Museum of Fine Art, Asia Contemporary Art Show, Yeelen Gallery, and the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. Additionally, La’ford’s artistic exploration has taken her to Bangkok, Thailand; Beijing, China; Cairo, Egypt; New Smyrna Beach, Florida ; and Ogden, Utah where she has engaged in art installations and residencies.

Anne von Freyburg

Meet the winner of the Robert Walters Group UK New Artist of the Year Award 2021 - Anne von Freyburg. The award, in collaboration with Saatchi Gallery and UK New Artists, helps to discover and champion the work of exceptional young artists whose work and vision represent contemporary Britain. Visit: www.robertwaltersgroup.com/ukna

Anne von Freyburg (b. 1979) is a Dutch artist based in London. She received her MFA from Goldsmiths (2016) and holds a BA in Fashion Design from ArtEZ Arnhem, The Netherlands. Von Freyburg is the winner of the Robert Walters UK New Artists Award (2021) and exhibited at Saatchi Gallery, London. She was nominated for The Ingram Prize (2021) and took part in the Cob x PLOP Winter Residency followed by an exhibition in November (2021). Her work was part of the Tapestry Triennial at the Central Textile Museum in Lodz, Poland (2022) one of the most prominent international Textile Museums worldwide and the renowned textile exhibition 32 Miniartextil in Como Italy. Von Freyburg’s work is in several international private collections.  

Her large-scale textile paintings are reconstructed Rococo portraits made out of a mixture of tapestry and contemporary fashion fabrics.The imagery focuses on a stylized idea around feminine beauty as found in the tradition of the French 18th-century artists Boucher and Fragonard.  Von Freyburg attempts to raise questions about taste, femininity, high and low art, and the constructs of female identity. The appropriated paintings are created with acrylic ink which is translated into hand-stitched fabrics and sewing techniques that give the work a quasi bodily presence. While on one hand Von Freyburg's works are playful and reference the decorative quality of their sources, on the other, their over-indulgence points to the excesses of throwaway fashion culture, selfies, and consumerism. By combining fine art with applied art in a conceptual way she aims at blurring the boundaries between them.

KRISTOPHER WRIGHT: JUST AS I AM

Kristopher Wright’s large-scale artworks intertwine the disciplines of painting and printmaking. Just As I Am features the artist’s latest body of work, filled with color and complexity. Wright is influenced by American iconography, machine diagrams, and personal narratives to create works that explore themes of joy, community, and healing. While his creative process begins with a found photograph, Wright quickly departs from the language of photography as he investigates how an image can shapeshift, changing form as it evolves through hybrid disciplines.

Just As I Am features 16 new, large-scale works that capture moments within places of sanctuary— communal backyard barbeques, sitting around the kitchen table, or time together in the living room after a satisfying meal. Wright refers to these moments as ”social engines,” a nod to the hand-drawn diagrams he overlays in his work to reference the constant personal repair and maintenance needed to grow and better oneself throughout life. The moments of gathering are symbolic of liturgical spaces in that they prompt feelings of gratitude, togetherness, and inclusivity.

The power in Wright’s work comes from his ability to translate these anonymous, humble snapshots into compositions that connect and resonate with the viewer in ways that feel deeply personal, and even sacred. Wright’s work meets the viewer with a raw sense of familiarity and comfort despite the ambiguity of who his subjects are. Identifying the subjects becomes less important than experiencing the feelings of security and joy nurtured within the works.

Suchitra Mattai, a multi-disciplinary artist of Indo-Caribbean descent, uses a mixed-media approach to explore how memory and myth allow us to unravel and re-imagine historical narratives.

Her primary pursuit is to give voice to people whose voices were once quieted. Using both her own family’s ocean migrations and research on the period of colonial indentured labor during the 19th Century, Suchitra seeks to expand our sense of “history.” Re-writing this colonial history contributes to contemporary dialogue by making visible the struggles and perseverance of those who lived it. She often focuses on the experiences of women and employs practices and materials associated with the domestic sphere such as embroidery, weaving, vintage saris and other fiber elements. Suchitra re-imagines found materials that have a rich past as a way of creating a dialogue with the original makers and the time periods in which they were once cherished as well as a means of navigating her own personal narrative. Thinking about colonization in Guyana and the rest of the Caribbean is a way of tracing her family’s history in Guyana and India and of fostering discussion around contemporary issues surrounding gender and labor.

Andrew Jensdotter - Artist as Explorer

Andrew Jensdotter’s paintings and drawings depict the visual static of collective imagery. Mining the glossy pages of magazines and online search queries, the artist transforms sets of related photographic content into physical layers of representational paintings on a single surface. This transfer from dematerialized imagery into physical layers of stacked paint serves as a means to a larger end. Upon building up numerous rendered layers onto a single canvas, the artist eviscerates the thick surface revealing a highly energetic composite made from a chosen subject matter’s accumulated color palette. Where once the eye had a specific subject to focus on, what remains is an all-over composition devoid of any focal point, forcing the eye to either race across its surface or relax into a psychedelic trance. The relationship between additive and subtractive processes, and the disintegration of the specific into the abstract presents a visual analog for the nature of processing information in the age of mass media.

 

Jonathan Saiz #WhatIsUtopia and Colorado Costal

Artist Jonathan Saiz and Denver Art Museum Curator Becky Heart discuss His concurrent exhibitions , “Colorado Coastal” at K Contemporary and #WhatIsUtopia at the Denver Art Museum

The often-apocalyptic themes in Jonathan Saiz’s work reflect the duality of the artist’s fascination with optimistic irreverence and a foreshadowing of darker things to come. Man-made climate-change, supernatural unknowns and all the social and spiritual upheaval that accompanies them.

His varied subject matter, explored like an intuitive stream-of-consciousness with scores of miniature paintings, drawings and sculptures, add up to glossy, candy-coated visual narratives imbued with existential dread.

“Saiz makes our terrors tangible in his artwork. By acknowledging fears in the periphery of our daily lives or the dark corners of our minds, the mechanisms of control — whether god or government — are disrupted. The gaze is powerful.” - 2016 @hyperallergic.com

Daisy Patton - This is Not Goodbye / A Rewilded Arcadia

Artist Daisy Patton and CU Art Museum Director Sandra Firmin offer exclusive insight about Daisy's work and her upcoming exhibitions at the University of Colorado Boulder and at K Contemporary. 

Patton’s practice is focused on history, memory, and social commentary stemming from this youth, soaked in such specific cultural landscapes. Her work explores the meaning and social conventions of families, little discussed or hidden histories, and what it is to be a person living in our contemporary world. One such series is Forgetting is so long, reviewed in Hyperallergic and The Denver Post, as well as featured in Create! Magazine, The Jealous Curator, Vasari21, Fraction Magazine, Full Blede, and Backroom Caracas.

Kevin Sloan - A Wanderer's Garden

Artist Kevin Sloan discusses the concepts behind his Solo exhibition "A Wanderer's Garden" at K Contemporary.  His work is ongoing inquiry into whether a painting can hold the qualities of wonder and awe amid the mundane and overlooked. This duality is reflective of our contemporary condition, one marked by dislocation and loss in the midst of the overwhelming and spectacular.

Additionally, he is interested in what it means to be a painter of the natural world in a time of such extraordinary change environmentally, politically and socially.  Remaining aware of all happening around while avoiding topical reportage and editorializing, he assumes the role of a compassionate witness.  Sloan’s hope is that compassion allows for empathy, which pushes away cynicism, which in turn allows curiosity and wonder to find a place in the work.