About the show
Looking back at the New York graffiti art (Graffiti) in the 1970s and 1980s, it took the city and the streets as the stage, and then quickly became popular in Europe and the world. It has strong symbols, continuous totems or written characters visually. Unlike legendary New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat in the 1980s, who directly expressed street art into museums or galleries, Kalab’s work is a transition from street art to a more refined language of abstraction. Once a well-known graffiti artist, he no longer only focuses on symbols and shapes. He spent the creation of installations transformed by symbols, and then switched to the field of abstract painting. Kalab was inspired by De Stijl from the past. The artistic spirit once advocated by Theo vanDoseburg: use the basic three primary colors of red, yellow and blue and the basic structure of high-abstract shapes to carry out contemporary art. From the works of Jan Kalab, it can be seen that in addition to the canvas, he even brought his art back to the streets, integrated into murals, and engraved in the corners of the city. In the round world, he can continue to explore the depth, dynamics, changes, eternal boundaries and other fascinating gradient experiments that freeze time. In the gradient circle, every line that becomes the limit, the edge where the color slowly overflows.
The boundaries between sight, painting and sculpture are slowly blurred and merged.
The exhibition “Concentration” at Bluerider ART this time brings Jan Kalab’s works in the past five years, including the Rainbow Circles series, Clouds series and Organic Gradients series. As usual, the artist uses custom-made organic-shaped frames and canvases as the scope of painting, and uses circles and spheres as the main image. Each work can be considered as a circle, point or circle, and it is also a graffiti writing Some of the symbols, such as the works: Mangonia and Sonoma, create a serene fluid circular gradient that takes your breath away; while Clouds is a series of circular paintings that bury the ever-changing The colorful sky and landscape show a rare magical moment. The Rainbow Circles series reveals that Kalab boldly brings the rainbow to the streets, imagining the artist who has just arrived in a city and begins to look for a suitable place to live, and the whole city is his canvas.
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Kalab uses the circle as a material container, and creates a dynamic illusion with gradient colors—as if the colors overflowing the canvas, pouring out freely without direction. This kind of process is pure and “focused”, which represents the absolute concentration that the artist must put into the process of painting. There is no difference in the artistic path from graffiti to painting. They are all quite devoted to the moment of creation. At the same time of concentration, time seems to flow The ground is particularly slow, and it also leads the viewer into a world of infinite imagination.
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