Art Files: Rachel Kalman
Roe, Oil on canvas, 30 x 26 inches, 2023.
Rachel Kalman is an observational still-life painter with a commitment to close-looking and foundational skills that guide her practice. She believes there is an ethic to observational painting in the sense that meaningful exchange occurs between painter and subject without any need for possession or ownership.
Kalman is currently working on a series of paintings that juxtapose decorative, kitsch aesthetics with difficult, often traumatic, realities. The genre of still-life painting is enormously rich in history but at times unfeeling and contextually privileged. She hopes that by luring the contemporary viewer in with compositional choice, saturated color, and laborious technique, the conceptual components of the work become much more urgent and disturbing. Still-life painting is a historically coded language wrapped in allegory and morality. While we have lost much of that collective dialect today, we remain visual creatures, capable of decoding and associating disparate modes of representation that reveal something odd, or perhaps true, about our contemporary world.
