Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to announce “The Owl of Minerva Flies at Dusk” an exhibition of new paintings by LA-based artist Forrest Kirk. Inspired by the writings of German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, Forrest Kirk’s most recent series of paintings depict an atmosphere of resounding orange sunsets amidst sci-fi landscapes filled with magical figures, buildings, and other imaginative forms of motion, depth, and color. Implicit in the paintings is a sense of otherworldliness, a subtle narrative of epoch. Recurring visual tropes, such as the owl, feathers, bombs, tigers, and biomorphic shapes appear and reappear throughout the paintings representing time, pressure, change, and reminders of the wildness that exists in all of us. The title of the exhibition riffs off a line from Hegel’s prototypical essay Preface to the Philosophy of Right, in which Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, and her pet owl, a symbol of not only knowledge but also of cultural discernment are invoked to encapsulate the philosophical thought that historical and individual development tends to happen in hindsight; simply put that life’s lessons are typically learned through making mistakes. The title of the exhibition also gives a proverbial nod to a desire for keeping a place for philosophy amidst our contemporary lives -- or in the artist's words "philosophy takes over at night when scientists are off work." Forrest’s signature medium of choice, aside from the deliberate array of acrylic paints and poetic moments of assemblage, is Gorilla Glue, which he uses as a means of establishing dimensionality within his work. The layers of paint and glue are built up and scraped away, creating valleys of texture, and often revealing what came before. There is an esthetic roughness juxtaposed with visual allure, amongst Forrest’s visceral canvases. It is not just the artist’s intentionally radical style that extends his paintings beyond convention, but also the artist’s ability to visually and intellectually address this complex web of cause and effect called life in a way that depends less on the emotional demands of the world, and more so in line with such precepts of compassion and inspiration. ______ John Sonsini’s “ Watercolors” is the artist's first exhibition of watercolor paintings and his second solo exhibition with the gallery. Sonsini has established himself as one of the foremost contemporary portrait painters working today. Alternating between studios in Southern California and Mexico he is most known for his expressive and politically charged portraits of Los Angeles Day Workers. During the height of the pandemic, Sonsini found himself sans live sitters and began an entirely new body of work, the process of which diverged from his practice spanning over four decades. Taking on the medium of watercolor, Sonsini has created a new series of insightfully detailed intimate paintings on a smaller scale from his oil portraits. “I started making the watercolors early on in the pandemic. Faced with a lengthy period of not being able to work with live sitters, and dissatisfied with painting from sketches, I looked to my paintings in public collections as a resource for my watercolor studies. But, in time, and as my fascination with the medium grew, it was less the imagery and far more the watercolor itself that pulled me in. It was a medium I had not spent much time looking at or considering. Back in 2019, when I was working on a multi-figured painting, I wanted to work out some color problems and I had watercolors at hand so I thought it would be an expedient way to deal with some color questions. I had some canvas boards lying around the studio, so I began using them for the watercolor and discovered that the watercolor and pencil performed marvelously together on this canvas surface which was entirely an accident and really pulled me into these mediums. Fast-forward to a year or so later, I was unable to have live sitters as I usually do and I wanted a project to get involved in so I picked up the watercolors with no intention of making a body of work at all and over that period of about a year I found myself using watercolor regularly and I noticed that the works were taking on a certain kind of presence for me that I was not expecting. They began as 'studies after' but were now completed works in their own right.” - John Sonsini _____ Image credit: Forrest Kirk, All Wisdom, 2022 Acrylic, spray paint, gorilla glue, mixed media on canvas 94" x 66" x 2" [HxWxD] (238.76 x 167.64 x 5.08 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles Photo credit: Jeff McLane