Published on Saturday, November 7, 2020 by Agitator Co-operative

Personal History in Narrative Figure Paintings: A Window to Artists’ Diverse Personal Experiences

by Andrea Kaspryk, Agitator member and co-founder

In June 2019 at Agitator Gallery, I curated my first show of figurative paintings, which I called Personal History in Narrative Figure Paintings. Putting out an open call for artists, I wanted to have the entire exhibit with a unified focus and look in terms of its medium, painting (either oil or acrylic) and in terms of its theme, narrative figurative paintings about the artist’s own personal experiences. The main limitation I faced was the small size of our storefront gallery space: it was only 650 square feet, so some artists had to limit the number of paintings they could display, and I was compelled to stop accepting additional painters into the show. (In relocating to a new space, Agitator Gallery plans on remedying this limitation by finding a much larger space.)

My starting point for the show in which I would be one of the exhibited painters began with making a series of paintings presenting a transgender body and identity using my own body and experience as a reference. One of my ongoing projects is to present transgender experience in oil paintings, which, as far as I know, has little representation. The work of Kerry James Marshall directly inspired and continues to inspire me in this regard: his project is to depict the experience of black people in fine art, especially in large format paintings with life-size figures.

For me the show represented a personal milestone and a breakthrough in terms of creating a series of symbolic figurative paintings representing my experiences of coming to terms with my transgender identity. I had set out on this path in the late 1990s when I was first coming out as a transgender person and visiting The Living Circle, a small lgbt support group with a focus on meditation and spirituality. There I was inspired to continue working on my art to represent my experiences, but I realized my limitations as an artist held me back from creating artwork that could more effectively convey my vision and concepts. As a result, I began to attend figure drawing drop-in sessions, take figure drawing and painting courses, and eventually went back to school for another degree in painting and drawing. (For anyone curious to read more about this journey, I have written about it in my recently published book Inner Journeys in Search of the Self: Essays, Poems and Guided Meditations.)

One notable community art space that deserves mention here, for it led me to find my way to Agitator Gallery, is AnySquared, a community art space in the Logan Square neighborhood in Chicago, where in 2014 I met Gretchen Hasse. She, together with Larry Kamphausen, made an open call for artists to join an art cooperative group; they held a presentation and sign-up night in February 2017. From this meeting, the initial members of what came to be called Agitator met and planned the art cooperative group, which moved into a gallery space in September 2017.

My first show at Agitator was a two-artist show with Tracy Kostenbader, the host and organizer of AnySquared, and curator of many local artist shows in Logan Square and in Chicago. It felt safer for me to do a show with an experienced curator first at Agitator: it was simply too intimidating a jump for me to just start curating an open call for a group show.

After the learning experience of this first show that I co-curated at Agitator, I decided I would face the challenge and organize my second Agitator show alone, and I would put an open call on social media for artists, and I would meet and work with artists that I did not know. By the time I had five artists who I would include in the show, I had to stop taking in applications, for the Agitator space would be filled up with their paintings.

As the artists began to bring in their work prior to the show, for me it was a great pleasure to see their actual physical paintings. For I had only seen small photo reproductions of their online, which the artists sent to me as part of their application to be in the show. And this experience reminds me that a painting, especially a larger one, possesses its own spiritual force, conveys some of the artist’s magical power and energy that can only be experienced in its physical presence.

I had no idea what the final show would turn out to look like, but I chose the first five applicants who met the criteria I created for accepting paintings (in terms of medium and theme). And it turned out to be a diverse group with four women and one man. Two painters were from abroad: Xiaotong Zhao, who is from China, and Kateryna Tkachenko, who is from Ukraine. A third painter, Gabriella Boros, is the daughter of Jewish immigrants from post-WW II Europe. The fourth artist in the show, Noel Ashley, is a local painter, who has lived in different places, but has returned to the Midwest, now residing in nearby Madison, Wisconsin. The fifth artist in the show, Jon McKay, is from Colorado and a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

As the curator for this show, I put in a lot of effort to prepare the show booklet and to organize and help hang the show, but in turn I was rewarded with the chance to meet and get to know the participating artists. One artist told me she was quite impressed and surprised such a gallery like ours existed and gave artists a chance to show their artwork in a gallery and community space. She observed our space as offering a more positive experience compared to showing her artwork at another art space, Rogers Park Art Gallery, a neighborhood storefront gallery, which is the successor of Gallery B1e.

Though no sales were made in the show I curated, it is my hope that artists in the show drew inspiration from it and from one another. And the primary goal of Agitator Gallery is not to sell artwork, though we welcome sales when they happen, but to offer still unknown and underrepresented artists a chance to show and share their artwork. This can lead to unexpected encounters and unplanned for new routes to be made in their art-making and being in the world. And visitors and viewers to the show can also come away from such a show with an insight and perhaps start out on a new path in their own life.

A brief comment can be made about each artist in the show here, and the artists’ statements about their work submitted to the show will be posted at the new Agitator website under the link Exhibitions. Each artist in the show addressed the challenges of their particular experience and/or their art practice.

Noel Ashley recently created a series of enormous nearly life-size figurative paintings that depict challenging moments in her role as a parent, a mother to her daughter. The large, bold, decisive brushstrokes in these paintings really appealed to me. Ashley’s paintings provide refreshing alternatives to the all too common and anodyne depictions of a happy mother with child. The bright and warm color of Ash’s paintings, as well as bold, large decisive brush strokes make them quite visually appealing in contrast to their subject matter: the difficulty of being a parent.

Gabriella Boros presents her Jewish identity and experience, her visit with her parents to their lost home and world in Eastern Europe in a series of four symbolic paintings on wood. Her parents survived the Holocaust there, but they and their daughter are regarded as unwelcome intruders when they revisit the past that locals are silent about; they are wary and hostile towards opening up to discuss the tragic past. In Boros’ paintings the daughter wears a bright yellow dress, which contrasts to the bright red (symbolizing anger) faces of the locals, two men, wearing dark blue suits who confront her.

Jon MacKay’s light and ethereal figure paintings offer a humorous dialogue from the secular present with images and themes from Renaissance art devoted to sacred themes. For example, popular food, the hotdog, makes its way into a MacKay’s depiction of a martyr in one painting; in another painting, instead of offering the viewer an image of grandeur that would befit a sacred scene, MacKay features a smudgy cloud of paint.

Kateryna Tkachenko approaches painting from a spiritual perspective: she regards a painting as a portal to another world of dreams and inner harmony. With a vibrant energy underlying her forms and colors, she makes analogies between the human, sentient world and the plant world: for the more we are able to see ourselves as part of this world she believes, the more integrated we can become.

Xiaotong Zhao presents with a confident technical understanding and handling of color, value and form, a critically informed perspective on the idealized depiction of the nude woman in Western art since the Renaissance and in particular of Asian women in the West as exotic. As an Asian woman, an immigrant from China, her paintings are meant to make viewers pause, for they short-circuit the familiar pleasure they expect to feel that is elicited by the fine art nude of women.