KEN NEVADOMI: Selected Works
Battery Maritime Building Slip 5
10 South St. New York, NY 10005 - September 9-12
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TUBE STRANGE
KEN NEVADOMI
Tuesday-Sunday, 11-7pm - September 9-30, 2021 281 Church St. New York, NY 10013
CHECKLIST // CV/BIO // SELECTED PRESS
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Echoes of primitive Ohio. Bionic rats for children of the poor. Muscular Christians. Man eats fish. Enthusiastic TV personalities. Western Thrombosis. New revelations in lobotomy. The hysterectomy 500. Humanity saved through Coma. Mondrian pursued by Kamikazes. Shark Miasma on the loose. Man Stays in Place for 40 years.
These notes, a small sample of the innumerable quips that fill Ken Nevadomi’s sketchbooks, dating back to the mid 1950s, remain some of our only clues when trying to chart the artist’s closely kept intentions. Often eluding the quick read, Nevadomi’s work thrives in a maelstrom of irony, erotic ambiguity, and comical anachronisms, reflecting the chaos and pessimism that permeated the collective unconscious sometime between the twilight of the American Rust Belt and the dawn of the Information Age.
At 281 Church St., TUBE STRANGE features two distinct bodies of work made around 1980 and 1990, that highlight the expanse of Nevadomi’s technical prowess and his oftentimes complicated and unsettling subject matter. The later series of paintings, entitled Tube Strange, features a group of crudely rendered domestic interiors, anchored by a solitary figure, affixed to a glowing television set, unaware of the looming presence watching them, or watching out for them. These rich tableaus are a premonitory echo of our contemporary moment, where the surveillance is disembodied, and the appliances are smaller, smarter, and broadband in their mesmeric grip on our psyche.
In stark contrast to these works are a group of paintings from 1978-1980, that center on the myth of St. Bridget, a recurring muse in Nevadomi’s work. Stuffed with restless symbolism, these tightly rendered compositions retain the vestiges of the artist's formative work as a commercial illustrator in the late 1960’s at American Greetings, alongside friends Harvey Pekar and R. Crumb. In works like Erroneous St Bridget (1980) and 20th Century Mayonnaise (1978-1980), the artist maintains a razor thin line between punishment and satisfaction, torture and cure, the disturbing and the sublime.
Nevadomi was born into a troubled family on Cleveland’s gritty south side. After enlisting in the army at 17 and serving two tours of duty overseas, he would eventually return to his hometown, where he would remain for the rest of his life, working as a professor of painting at Cleveland State University and amassing a remarkable body of work over his nearly 50-year career. As the expressionist painter Doug Utter attests: “Planting both feet in Cleveland is already an act of defiance that guarantees obscurity and marginalization — a kind of originality to which few artists aspire. But Nevadomi has held his ground, doing his work and following his path through the decades–the most that can be done by anyone, in any context.”
Retiring from his position at Cleveland State University in 2013, Ken continues painting and filling his sketchbooks. In 2018, he was diagnosed with a mild case of Alzheimers and has recently moved to assisted living where he will soon resume teaching painting again, this time instructing the members of his new community. As the artist affirms in a 1984 Smithsonian interview with curator Dennis Barrie, “…my attitude is still the same. I can't count on selling art as a way of life, as a way of making money. And I don't even think about it, I like to teach.”
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Ken Nevadomi, born 1939, in Cleveland, Ohio. Earned his B.F.A. in 1972 from Columbus College of Art and Design and his M.F.A. in 1975 from Kent State University. His paintings have appeared in over 40 juried shows and at least sixteen one-man shows since 1975, and he has won three individual artist grants from the Ohio Arts Council. His work appeared in numerous May Show exhibitions at The Cleveland Museum of Art, and he won first prize for painting in 1975. His work is included in the art collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Progressive Corporation, Premier Industrial Corporation, Jones Day Cleveland, McMaster-Carr Company, and BP, among others. This summer, the Artists Archive of Western Reserve in Cleveland mounted a retrospective of Nevadomi’s works from 1976-2006. In October of 2021, Wolfs Gallery will present the first in a series of exhibitions culminating with a comprehensive survey sometime next year.
Both presentations are in close collaboration with Wolfs and feature works culled directly from the artist’s personal collection. Follow Wolfs for more information on their calendar of upcoming exhibitions featuring Ken Nevadomi. For a comprehensive checklist and archival documentation, see New Canons’ online viewing room, as part of the Independent Art Fair’s virtual offerings now up through September 26th.