LEELEE KIMMEL: THE WIND AND THE SHORE
Almine Rech New York is pleased to present The Wilds and the Shore by Leelee Kimmel. Kimmel is outside of fashion: not so much as a whisper of personal experience or life story, no appeal to identity, that skeleton key to all living myths and histories, omnipresent and deader than the Rev.
May 7 - June 15, 2024
Casuabon’s hopeless attempt to find the key to all mythology. But keeping within the conspectus of the Victorian novel, nothing is more perversely animated, more plastic with eldritch innovation, than what is dead: Dracula, Frankenstein, and a comically replete world of unquiet spirits. Kimmel would be uninterested in pursuing the Matisse idea of art, that beautiful armchair — but no one shirks Matisse, that’s just wrong and rude.
Kimmel works within a very well known history of postwar painting: Abstract Expressionism. And yet her paintings don’t look much or anything like those produced by First- and Second-generation Abstract Expressionists, the habitués of the Cedar Tavern, the gristle and sinew of the Tenth Street School. For such a stereotypically “masculine” and “tough guy” stratosphere, a lot of the guys underperform as *real men*.
The guys guys in this orchidaceous-hot realm were the women: Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell, Elaine de Kooning and Grace Hartigan: they all unsex themselves after the manner of early radical feminist Lady Macbeth. Perhaps it’s fitting that among contemporary painters, certain women are their most vital descendants, keeping the shop of the forties and fifties open today and ever young: Julie Mehretu, Cecily Brown, Jacqueline Humphries, Laura Owens, and Kimmel; resisting the vulgar or maybe just way overdone and shopworn identity ideology of making and being.
An intense even overwhelming physicality bursts through many of Kimmel’s paintings. Again, love Matisse we really aren’t worthy—but that luxurious armchair or maybe wing chair overbearing and *powerful* to use that stupid word we admit we love.
They disorientate and undermine purpose. In one of several erotic sections in the Enquiry Burke describes the experience of looking at a beautiful woman’s body: it is, he writes, like a ‘deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye glides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried.’
“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling….When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience."