Jonathan LeVine Gallery is pleased to announce Midnight Reverie, a series of new works by highly celebrated Los Angeles-based artist Audrey Kawasaki, in what will be her second solo exhibition at the gallery.
Kawasaki’s work conveys the subtle intrigue and mystique of feminine sensuality through contrasting themes of innocence and eroticism. She paints sultry, seductive female subjects posed provocatively and often gazing suggestively at the viewer. Their graceful gestures, delicate features and direct eye contact exudes a combination of melancholy and desire.
Kawasaki creates finely detailed imagery by applying thin washes of oil paint onto wooden panels, accentuated by sharp organic lines drawn with control and precision, in graphite. The natural wood grain adds a warm glow to her enigmatic subject matter, complementing the curves and contours of the female form, flowing hair and floral adornments.
Midnight Reverie marks a new direction in Kawasaki’s imagery, in that—for the first time—the works in this exhibition feature flat, graphic shapes, painted in layers of solid black acrylic. Incorporating these dark, crisp, bold elements adds a stark contrast with the soft, delicate quality of the artist’s signature female portraiture. Additionally, Kawasaki rendered her figures and their environments in this series with much more vibrant hues as compared to previous works in which she employed a subdued, muted color palette.
The subject matter in this exhibition has a surreal, whimsical, dream-like tone. In the artist’s words: “Some of the pieces have windows, like passage-ways into another world, yet it can also feel like limbo or static—wanting to walk through to the other side, but not being able to. Others are deep in the make believe, magical, mystical realm. In these, the black parts represent a void, emptiness or the unknown, yet they can also be something real and solid, like holes or shadows.”
