Tom Koehler at King’s Leap

Artist: Tom Koehler

Exhibition title: Brass Duck Head Bookend Rendezvous

Venue: King’s Leap, New York, US

Date: February 25 – April 3, 2022

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and King’s Leap, New York

King’s Leap Fine Arts is thrilled to share a solo exhibition of new works by Tom Koehler. This is Koehler’s third presentation with the gallery, after his solo in 2019, and a two-person in 2021 at NADA House, Governors Island, with frequent collaborator and gallery artist Nandi Loaf. Exhibited in Brass Duck Head Bookend Rendezvous are four traditional oils, which were realized between 2020-2021.

Koehler’s practice is cross-disciplinary, engaging various other mediums such as cast metal sculpture, readymades and curatorial projects. Uniting Koehler’s work is a poetic materiality, which uses as its subject American mass culture and subculture. At this intersection, Koehler meditates on power, intimacy, and the value inscribed in contemporary iconography.

In these works, Koehler asks his friends/collaborators to select images for him to paint, chosen from digital subcultures or found ephemera from his archive. The content is painted on top of a white gessoed backdrop, with two images floating side by side in a vacuous ether. From afar, the paintings appear hyper-realist, but as the viewer gets closer to the work, the paintings become deeply expressive and nearly abstract in their execution. Rather than using painting as a representational or narrative device, Koehler uses it as a reflection of our social relationships and the way they manifest in visual images.

Tom Koehler (b. 1984) is an artist based in New York. Recent solo and two-person presentations include Mery Gates (Brooklyn, NY), King’s Leap presented by NADA House (Governors Island, NY), and Love (New York, NY). Koehler runs Love, a gallery formed in 2019 and currently based in the Lower East Side, New York.