Karel Funk
Karel Funk’s hyper-realist portraits are as enigmatic as the urbanites they depict. here, a first look at the Canadian painter’s upcoming New York show.
March 2010
Anyone who has ever ridden the New York subway at rush hour knows the
feeling of being pressed so close to your fellow commuters that you can
see their every pore, shaving nick and flaking follicle. To artist Karel
Funk, newly arrived in Manhattan from his native Winnipeg, Manitoba, in
2001, that proximity to strangers on a train proved overwhelming at
first—then career changing. He’d been toying with suburban angst in his
paintings but felt that route was already well traveled by others. In
urban voyeurism, however, he knew he had found his ideal subject.
“I was fascinated by how this boundary of personal space completely
disappeared on the subway,” Funk recalls by phone from his home in
Winnipeg, where he returned in 2003 and works in a studio in the
basement of his house. “You could see details of somebody’s ear or neck
that you’d never observe just socializing with friends because there’s
this boundary we all keep.”
It’s those close encounters with strangers that inspire Funk’s
hyper-realist, neo-Renaissance portraits of young urbanites, the latest
of which go on view in April at New York’s 303 Gallery. “I wanted to
convey that moment when you’re forced to look intimately at the back of
a stranger’s head, but I didn’t want there to be any emotional
connection,” says Funk, who depicts minute details like an acne scar or
a fabric fold with exquisite, microscopic clarity, applying sometimes up
to a hundred layers of acrylic to a wood panel. To Carter Foster,
curator of drawings at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which owns a
Funk, the 38-year-old artist “comes close to [Edward] Hopper in the way
his works implicate the viewer as a kind of voyeur.”
Yet even as he allows us to scrutinize his subjects, Funk reveals little
of their lives. His paintings are firmly rooted in the history of
portraiture, he says, acknowledging his debt to Renaissance masters such
as Holbein and Bronzino, with their focus on precise detail and
brushwork. And like those artists, he pays great attention to what his
subjects wear, seeing the jackets and hoodies he provides them as
modern-day armor and shields.
But unlike traditional portraiture, in which the subject typically locks
eyes with the viewer and background details provide clues about them,
Funk’s subjects face away from us or have their eyes closed, as if
they’re unaware of our presence.
“As soon as you see a face—there might be some tension in the eyes or
mouth—there’s a story, a feeling,” he says. By obscuring the face or
cloaking it altogether as Funk does, “it becomes very hard to find a
specific narrative or emotion about that person,” he notes. “My
paintings give you very little. There’s nothing there to connect with
except for the formal qualities, the texture of skin, hair or clothing,
and the questions you’re left with about ‘Who is that person?’”
Growing up in Winnipeg, where his father was an architect and his mother
a music teacher, Funk was a die-hard skateboarder as a teen, but at 21
he turned to painting at the University of Manitoba. In New York he
earned an M.F.A. at Columbia University, attracting notice straight out
of grad school with his critically lauded first solo show, in 2004 at
303 Gallery. So assured was his style, The New York Times critic Roberta
Smith wrote at the time, that “it does make you wonder what is left for
him to do.”
What he’s done lately is paint women for the first time. He’d stayed
away from female subjects, he explains, not wanting to introduce the
idea of an emotional or a sexual dynamic between artist and model. But
as a result, he says, he had come to be seen as a male painter who
paints only men, which introduced another unintended narrative into his
work. Painting both genders “makes me a painter who is just looking at
people.” He has also moved further into abstraction. One painting shows
only a jacket, another a hood. You can still discern the figure beneath
them, though just barely. “It feels like you’re looking down on a relief
map,” says the artist.
Funk photographs his models in poses against white backgrounds, and
later refers to the digital images on his computer screen while he
paints, inventing as he goes until, in the home stretch, he ignores the
photographs entirely. “At a certain point you have to make it into a
painting,” Funk says, “so that it’s speaking by itself.” The works on
the pages that follow do just that.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Reply to message