Ameringer Mcenery Yohe is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent works by Kevin Appel. The exhibition will open 13 March and will remain on view through 19 April 2014. A public reception for the artist will be held on 13 March from 6:00 to 8:00 PM.

Using his photographs as a ground on which to build paintings, Appel applies layers of paint to the mechanically printed image on each canvas. He is responding to that which could be interpreted as a complete photographic image by obstructing and compressing the space with a screen of paint to bring the two methods of viewing contentiously together as the viewer looks through one element to another and back. The abstract application of paint on the surface and a photographic representation of another time and place masked in the background create layers, each obliterating the last.

The discarded desert landscape churns below the painted surface, in and out of view, often recalling gestural brushwork while giving the abstractions a sense of deep space. Alternately, the painted surface exhibits strong compositions with deliberate application of oil and acrylic paint in hard-edge geometric patterns and forms derived from the built environment.

In these new works, Appel furthers his ongoing contemplation of the compromised landscapes and failed utopias endemic to Southern California. Appel focuses on the developed and underdeveloped layers that constitute the collage-like, organic nature of Los Angeles and its surrounding desert. In these environments, he focuses on a subject that has collapsed on itself projecting a sense of the catastrophic. For Appel, this is not a negative or grim fact. Rather it is what interests him about the urban environment specific to the terrain in which he dwells.

Kevin Appel was born in 1967 in Los Angeles, California. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Parsons School of Design in New York in 1990 and his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1995. The artist is the recipient of the 2011 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists and the Citibank Private Bank Emerging Artist Award, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Appel has had numerous national and international solo exhibitions, including “Paintings,” Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City, CA; “Drawings,” ACME., Los Angeles, CA; and “Descripcion sin lugar: Una seleccion de obras de Kevin Appel,” Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico. He has also had exhibitions at Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY; Wilkinson Gallery, London, United Kingdom; Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; among others.

Group exhibitions include “Kevin Appel, Canon Hudson, Betsy Lin Seder,” Samuel Freeman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; “LANY,” Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY; “Beta Space: Kevin Appel and Ruben Ochoa,” San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; “Drawing Now: Eight Propositions,” The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; “Painting at the Edge of the World,” Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and “Abstract Painting Once Removed,” Contemporary Arts Center, Houston, TX; among others.

Appel’s work may be found in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; The New York Public Library, New York, NY; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI; the Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; the Logan Collection, Vail, CO; and the Saatchi Collection, London, United Kingdom.

Kevin Appel lives and works in Los Angeles.