Branden Koch
“The Fourth Molt”
October 25 – November 29, 2008
LOS ANGELES — High Energy Constructs is pleased to present Branden Koch’s second solo exhibition with the gallery entitled “The Fourth Molt.” The exhibition primarily consists of three new large-scale paintings, each simply concerned with their mutated relationship to one other, revealing a complementary exploration of formal and thematic possibility. A solo exhibition of Koch’s paintings also entitled “The Forth Molt” will concurrently be on view at the Harwood Art Center, Albuquerque, NM until October 29, 2008. A limited edition broadside with writing by New York artist Ryan Harden Brown and Lucy Raven will be available for each exhibition.
“The Fourth Molt” offers paintings that combine modes of mechanical production, gestural abstraction, and collaged surfaces with painted transfers of found objects and the architecture of the artist’s studio. The painting Not Not Yet weds two vastly different surfaces. One lifted, constructed, from the artist’s studio floor painted with heavy floor enamel. The other, a soaked-in splotchy blue and white field of color lifted from acrylic paint spilled on a folded tarpaulin.
In Holbox Repellant the artist uses a Mayan hammock acquired from a recent trip to Yucatan, Mexico as a tool to create an image of the woven apparatus stained as a ground into raw canvas. A shimmering field of sporadic yet controlled form and gesture is held within, suspended in a strange illusory yellow light seeming to radiate from within the thin surface.
In the artist’s words:
“…It is a necessary obstacle to negotiate with one’s experience and imagination; as a need, and as a skeptical trust. Exactly how a painting is made becomes a necessary tangible in relation to a perceptual theater. A transparent barrier, a slippery site. Ultimately a slow-release contradicting with reciprocation, honesty, and critique; a cultural object generating useful thought, caught between dog and wolf.”
About the Artist:
Branden Koch was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He has had solo exhibitions at Rowland Contemporary (Chicago, IL) and at HIGH ENERGY CONSTRUCTS with his solo debut exhibition, Discorporate (September 2006). A solo exhibition of his paintings will be on view at the Harwood Art Center, (Albuquerque, NM) October 3 - 29, 2008. Branden also curates “One Night Stand” group exhibitions in his Brooklyn apartment, and is a contributing writer for Artillery Magazine. He received his MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and a BFA in painting from The Cleveland Institute of Art.
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Exhibition view
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Exhibition broadside
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Holbox Repellant, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 77 in.
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Untitled, 2008, ink on paper, 10 x 8 in.
Untitled, 2008, ink on paper, 10 x 8 in.