KANTOR GALLERY
ARTISTS EXHIBITIONS EDITIONS PRESS GALLERY PRIVATE
HAVARD HOMSTEVDT
Dud

March 30 thru April 29, 2006

7025 Melrose Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90038

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HÅVARD HOMSTVEDT
Earthling
2006
oil and acrylic on linen
84″ x 72″

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Exhibition dates: March 30 – April 29, 2006
Opening reception: March 30, 6-9pm

HÅVARD HOMSTVEDT
“Dud”

Kantor / Feuer Gallery is pleased to announce the first Los Angeles solo exhibition for New York-based artist Håvard Homstvedt. The exhibition consists of six large and two small oil and acrylic paintings on linen. Homstvedt’s paintings seek to draw the viewer in, but he also seeks to maintain a focus on the surface and material of the work. The title, “Dud”, refers to rags, ragged clothes, and tatters. The artworks themselves seem to explore the fabric of paint. They initiate us into a practice of viewing that is simultaneously pleasurable and melancholic.

One painting, “Wall,” focuses on a figurative element slinking along a striated corridor. Homstvedt’s figure here folds and yields like a landscape. The image stitches together an illusionistic space with paint in a way that is at once hopeful and romantic, yet also sinister. The figure is shell-like and hollow. Like a pair of empty stockings, its form suggests absence as much as presence.

The painting “Black Hussar” nods at outmoded genre scenes, invoking familiar elements of storytelling. The stoic soldier could be taken from a German polka folksong. He attracts the viewer’s own sense of nostalgia. In “Remnant”, a pile of flat figurative fragments lie like bodies of fairy-tale characters awaiting animation in some Goya-esque antechamber. The works present the texture and technique of painting as one of many arts activated as a way of exploring an ethic based on the fetishization of labor.

Born in 1976 in Norway, Håvard Homstvedt received a BFA from RISD and an MFA from Yale University. He has had solo exhibitions with Southfirst in Brooklyn, New York and Bodi Modern Art Galleries in Newport, Rhode Island. He lives and works in New York.