303 Gallery presents our first solo exhibition of paintings by Karel Funk.
For this exhibition, Karel Funk has painted eleven individual male subjects, each isolated in white fields. The work is modest in scale, all averaging about 15 x 18 inches.
"Untitled #3" depicts a young man with soft brown hair, light brown eyes and fair skin, wearing a red hooded sweatshirt. The hood drapes around his neck and down his back. This sloping rectangular form is one of the main elements of his minimal composition. Funk has subdued the narrative of his work so much that primarily formal and painterly concerns assert themselves. The highly "real" appearance of Funk’s work and contrasting surface textures reveal surprising levels of abstraction.
The boy in "Untitled #3" is looking to the left. The averted gaze of this subject, as well as most of the others, simultaneously draws the viewer in while avoiding any expected interaction. It is hard to glean a bit of inner knowledge about these men - who they are or what they are feeling. Different from traditional portrait-like painting, Funk’s figures convey very little specific emotion or sense of human experience. Funk’s idiosyncratic language and deep adoration of his medium have led him to develop a unique perspective to the contemporary dialogue about painting.
Karel Funk was recently included in the “Superreal” exhibition curated by Lauri Firstenberg at the Prague Biennale, which was also shown at The Marella Arte Contemporanea in Milan, Italy. The artist has also been included in the exhibition “Painting as Paradox” at Artists Space, New York, and in “Figuring the Future” at Site Gallery in Winnipeg, Canada. Karel Funk graduated Columbia University with an MFA in 2003, and he lives and works in Winnipeg, Canada.