Obi Kaufmann
925.951.7501
Victorian Rat Gallery
Oakland. California
510.575.9278
Show dates: 11.19.11 through 12.18.11
ARTIST RECEPTION: Saturday 11.19.11, 6pm to 9pm
“…Painting in a cave by candlelight…”
Victorian Rat Gallery is proud to present the paintings of Obi Kaufmann in a solo show entitled THUNDERBIRD. After recent sold-out exhibits in both Oakland and Seattle, and on the heels of last year’s popular WARFLOWER at San Francisco’s Five Points Art House, Kaufmann brings his most savage paintings to date back home to North Oakland.
In THUNDERBIRD, Kaufmann continues his exploration of what he calls The Gothic Nouveau, or the romanticizing of figurative archetypes into a graphic language of expressionist motifs and graffiti-like illustration. DeWitt Cheng, while reviewing Kaufmann’s work in 2010 for artbusiness.com, called it “meditational and (serving a) ritual function,” while Todd Kerr, in the Berkeley Times, said that Kaufmann’s paintings are “primal and pure…could it get any more real?” When confronting the sometimes dark imagery of Kaufmann’s work, the artbusiness.com writer known as RWM said “there is injury there, but also a connection with the tormentors.”
Victorian Rat Gallery is run by husband and wife David Seiler and Brianna Brandow-Seiler. They invite you to join them for the candle-lit reception of THUNDERBIRD on Saturday, November 19th, 2011 at 6pm.
“The Thunderbird paintings, of course, come from my own vision of the mythic figure - the form and bodily proportion as a thought-construct, a creative landscape inhabited by non-personalities who exist in a sexless voice, a genderless place. I exercise a ton of graphic license with the model and insist the rendered personality only exist in the picture plane – to exist in only a kind of non-narrative dream-place; the human figure itself, as its own landscape, ornamented with textual perifera that serves, specifically, to both inform and distract.” – Obi Kaufmann, 2011.