Dean Kugler and Eric Orhn

Time is running out to go see Relic by Dean Kugler and Momentarily Present by Erik Ohrn -an exceptionally inspired pairing of artist at Quad City Arts in Rock Island.  This is the final week to check out the exhibition that these two dynamic artists have put together.

Let's start with the pieces in Dean Kugler's Relic -a series of predominantly fragmented (or covered) figurative works.  Dean continues to grow as an artist -pushing himself and his media into new directions.  In Relic, he frequently explores the threshold of how little of a figure needs to be shown/present to convey an idea and/or emotion, whether it be loss, longing, resistance, struggle, or determination.

Kugler uses areas of tension to direct the viewer's attention to the heart of 'the action'.

Here the figure pulls against the cables wrapped around its long, slender, cone-like body.  Is he struggling against personal barriers, or is the figure itself rising out of the past and trying to establish his own path/destiny?

Kugler's various surfaces of rust and verdigris are seductive to the extreme.  They convey as timeless sense of struggle, loss, and solitary contemplation.

You can see in this image how well the two 'bodies' (Kugler's and Ohrn's) of work interact with each other in the Quad City Arts gallery space).

I can't get enough of Kugler's surface treatment on these wings.

What is so inspired about the pairing of these two artists is that Erik Orhn is also exploring fragmentation of the figure -but more in order to create a physical representation (painting) that captures the haze of partially remembered people or events.  Some of his works give the the viewer the feeling of actively participating in the act of remembering along with the artist.

These fragmented figures do have a jarring quality to them -as if the memory hasn't fully coalesced, or that memories of an event along a timeline are trying to be jammed into one moment (an example would be the moment someone you were having a conversation with abruptly turns and walks away and in your remembering of that event you combined the person facing you as they spoke, but also the moment they turned away). 

This jarring quality is subdued by Ohrn's playful, almost candy-like at times, color palette.  His wise and seductive use of colors pulls you in before you can grapple with the unsettling nature of his partial figures (think Francis Bacon with a lighter color palette).

Ohrn also isn't afraid to build up his surfaces with thick, impasto-like globs/swaths of color.

This low-relief versus flat(ter) surface tug-of-war creates a compelling tension within Ohrn's compositions.

There are just a few more days to go see Relic and Momentarily Present at Quad City Arts in Rock Island.