Loren Munk
PAINTING about THINKING about PAINTING
Artist Statement
The work of the last decade and a half is therefore a consolidation of Munk’s historical, documentary, and critical concerns. But it would be a mistake to read his maps and timelines simply as cleverly designed conveyers of information, as engaging as they are to look at. They are also fiendishly devised compositions often skating along the edge of chaos, their complexity heightened through virtuosic displays of graphics and lettering, tours de force of coloristic invention, and masterful flourishes of painterly skill.
For all their formal ingenuity, Munk’s paintings, as demonstrated by the works in this exhibition, are personal meditations on art as a profoundly human and humane activity, elucidating the connections between art and history, art and society, and art and the mind. As Munk wrote in “History by Exclusion, Illuminating the ‘Dark Matter’ of the Art World,” a manifesto that accompanied his solo exhibition, We Are Our Own Art History, at Dam & Stuhltrager in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to be an artist is to “partake in the reception, exchange and generation of the energy which is manifest as art.”
In this regard, the two qualities that set these paintings apart, not simply as artworks but as insightful contributions to the very field they elucidate (and, to a considerable degree, satirize), is their specificity and encyclopedic range.
Artist Bio
Munk moved to New York City in 1979 to establish a studio, and continue his studies at the Art Students League on the G.I. Bill. He’s had over a dozen one person shows in New York, Berlin, Munich, Paris and São Paulo. The artist has executed numerous national and international public and private commissions, including a mural for the Mayor’s Office of Paris. He is well represented in important collections throughout Europe, South and North America and the Middle East. His column in the Brooklyn Rail from 2001-2013 was a long running feature and the most consistent in-depth coverage of the Brooklyn art scene available. In 2006 he began the JamesKalm Report and Rough Cut channels on YouTube. This project has eleven hundred posted programs and over ten million views worldwide. His painting work has been reviewed by Roberta Smith in the New York Times, Jerry Saltz in New York Magazine, Raphael Rubinstein in Art in America and Hrag Vartanian at Hyperallergic.
