Marking his eleventh solo exhibition with the gallery, Chris Kahler presents a selection of new paintings titled PROXIMITY. This new series of abstractions further expands upon the dynamic interplay between organic linear networks and hard-edge geometry that has come to characterize the artist’s unique work. In conjunction with the exhibition, Bruno David Gallery will publish a catalogue of the artist’s recent work with an in-depth exhibition history and bibliography.

David B. Olsen writes about Kahler’s new works: “When you see them now, them, the elements of Chris Kahler’s new paintings seem especially close. If we’ve become acutely aware of distance in daily life, these paintings depict the ebullient opposite of that. Forms both amorphous and geometrical alternately shift, batch, and huddle upon the surface; lines touch, intersect, and overlap, at once running up against and counter to each other. Kahler’s new visual vocabulary is productively, gorgeously claustrophobic in the same way that a map, when viewed from a reasonable distance, suggests that everything is actually pretty close, an entire world within reach. These works anticipate the figuration of our fraught times while also reminding us of the prime mover of painting as such—the containment of that which is viscous, three-dimensional, and fluid.”

Chris Kahler is the Chair of the Department of Art + Design, Associate Director of the School of the Arts and Professor of Painting at Eastern Illinois University. He received his B.F.A. at Ohio Wesleyan University and M.F.A. from Northwestern University, Chicago, IL. Kahler has been the subject of numerous one-person exhibitions at venues including the Richard Ross Art Museum, Delaware, OH (2014); Anita Wooten Gallery, Valencia College, Orlando, FL (2011); John P. Weatherhead Gallery, University of Saint Francis, Fort Wayne, IN (2009); Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago, IL (2002).