Anna Kunz: With Rays

About

These relationships and reactions occur simultaneously, like an entire improvisational jazz arrangement played as the receiver encounters each pitch and chord of color. Unexpected notes of form provide a site of, in the artist’s words, “shared sensory experiences and the temporary disruption of social and material boundaries.”

With respect to Josef Albers’s eponymous 1959 painting Homage to the Square: With Rays in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Kunz seeks to convey through her compositions in this exhibition optical progressions as colors “ray out” towards the viewer and into their vision. Following Albers in drawing parallels between the relationships of colors and those of humans, Kunz’s approach to color perception produces an intra-active—a term coined by feminist physicist Karen Barad, which postulates that action originates from within relationships’ structures, not from cause and effect between individual entities—viewing experience. Her colors captivate the viewer in bodily contemplation as each layer tenderly reveals its instability, contingent on light, time, and perspective.

Conceived of as one continuous body of work, each of Kunz’s paintings function both independently and interdependently. The artist paints on the floor with only two colors a day, carefully layering watery washes while moving around each edge. Working on multiple canvases simultaneously, Kunz orchestrates a coherent conversation, or argument, in the lexicon of color. Through her ritualistic labor of care—applying color like scattered light, creating pulsing, breathing forms—she imbues her paintings with depth. Much like life’s delicacy, her shapes are poised in a fragile balance, teetering on the edge of transparency and opacity, falling into or surging from the canvas. As these colors become bodies leaning on and bleeding into one another, they build what the artist calls “compassionate geometry.”

Often titling her artworks with found words and phrases from poetry and prose, Kunz describes composing her work in terms of orchestrating, writing, and choreographing. The language around painting proves insufficient for the ways in which her work captures sensations; and even this language proves reductive and elusive for paintings which, in her words, “privilege sensation over interpretation.” Centering a viewer in awareness, Kunz’s work presents ebullient space for introspection and communion, while also confronting viewers with their own, in Kunz’s words, “embodied subjectivities.