Lot 242: KEVIN APPEL

Country Home #4 (Dreamer)
Signed, titled and dated "Kevin Appel Country Home 3 (Dreamer) 2006" on the reverse.

77 x 80 in. (195.6 x 203.2 cm).

Oil, enamel, acrylic on canvas over panel.

2006

Wilkinson Gallery, London

Kevin Appel’s new paintings depict a world so fractured that it’s hard to imagine the damage ever being
repaired. Psychological trauma and social unrest ripple across the smooth surfaces of his canvases, revealing
the artist to be a sharp-eyed Realist whose uncompromising work is all the stronger for being metaphorical
and suggestive. […] Raw anxiety and gut-tightening dread percolate beneath the deceptively antiseptic
surfaces of those loaded paintings, suggesting a diabolical alliance between Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
and the Unabomber. Appel’s new paintings […] dive deeper into the potential for violence—both natural
and otherwise—that defines a nation gripped by fear and driven by the desire to obliterate terrorism. […]
The blunt-force trauma that Appel’s paintings make palpable is not the whole story. He crafts his canvases
with consummate care and labor-intensive devotion, building their compositions with considerable delicacy,
unassuming felicity and formal sophistication. Their circle-the-wagons atmosphere attests to a type of go-italone
defiance made famous by all types of survivors, both real and mythical.
D. Pagel, “Not just divided but violently ripped apart,” Los Angeles Times, November 19, 2004