Pierre Menard Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of selections from ten years of oil paintings by the Cambridge-based artist Nicholas Kilmer. Kilmer’s work treats of the ethereal: his secret subjects are light, motion and air even while depicting the sinuousities of dancing bodies, streams, clothing wracked by wind, tortuous garden hoses or the vital flow by which apple branches are formed. His large elegant canvases achieve extraordinary subtlety and expressiveness with a minimum number of brushstrokes – one feels the spiritual heritage of a Matisse. And, unlike the vast cohort of contemporary artists, Kilmer is finely attuned to a visual practice which can only be called connoisseurship, which informs a painterly practice strangely at odds with it: one pictures Kilmer with his easel and paints near his Normandy retreat like Cezanne in the hills of Aix, eyes trained on invisible forms, oblivious to the elements, engaging a dance of color whose rhythms result in fluid and expressive paeans to motion.
Kilmer is author of numerous art monographs, memoirs, poems and a successful series of art-world mystery stories. He has been active as an art dealer, teacher and researcher, yet manages deftly to avoid the gravitational forces of history, the academy and the market in his work, producing elegant appreciations of the fundamental things of the world, alive with motion, shot through with the subtleties of light which remain in our memories at the cusp of perception and insight and to which we return obsessively in our quest to know the world.
Nick Kilmer’s work is held in numerous public, corporate and private collections. A catalogue, with an essay by Henry Moss and a dialogue between Kilmer and Belinda Rathbone, will accompany the exhibition.
The show will run from the 5th of September through the 2nd of October with an opening reception on Friday 14 September from 6-9PM. The artist will be in attendance.