Deborah Kass
“I use history as a readymade,” Deborah Kass has declared. “I use the language of painting to talk about value and meaning. How has art history constructed power and meaning? How has it reflected the culture at large? How does art and the history of art describe power?”
Most discourses around power and meaning today are—or should be—undergoing serious reconsideration. Theories of knowledge have bent to the breaking point. The combined weight of political instability, alternative facts, a growing rejection of science and the destabilizing effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the growing use of state violence, have mined the confidence of people around the world but of Americans especially.
Enter Deborah Kass’s Feel Good Paintings For Feel Bad Times. A set of canvases that use language and the sanctioned stylings of celebrated male artists to express key cultural conflicts, they marshal wit and graphic punch to force a confrontation between the canonical (the orthodoxies established by male artists) and the disruptive (their appropriation by a female artist). The results are demystifying, cutting, and often hilarious. They are also hopeful. At times being funny is simply saying what’s true.
— CVF, USFCAM
Artist Deborah Kass. Photo courtesy Grace Roselli, The Pandora's BoxX Project.
About Deborah Kass
(San Antonio, Texas, 1952)
She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Deborah Kass is an artist whose work examines the intersection of art history, popular culture, and the self. Her work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), The Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Whitney Museum of Art (New York), The Solomon Guggenheim Museum (New York), The Jewish Museum (New York), The Museum of Fine Art (Boston, Massachusetts), The Cincinnati Museum, The New Orleans Museum, The National Portrait Gallery-Smithsonian Institute (Washington, DC), as well as other museums and private collections. The Andy Warhol Museum presented Deborah Kass, Before and Happily Ever After, Mid-Career Retrospective in 2012, with a catalogue published by Rizzoli. Her monumental sculpture OY/YO in Brooklyn Bridge Park became an instant icon, and is now permanently installed in front of the Brooklyn Museum and the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. In 2018, Kass was inducted into The National Academy. In 2014, Kass was inducted into the New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame. She was honored with the Passionate Artist Award by the Neuberger Museum in 2016 and was the Cultural Honoree at the Jewish Museum in 2017. She serves on the boards of the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Artist website: deborahkass.com
Artist Instagram: @debkass
Artist Twitter: @deborahkass
Gallery website: kavigupta.com