OPENING RECEPTION: 1ST THURSDAY, AUGUST 4, 2016 FROM 5 - 8PM.
Sullivan Goss - An American Gallery is pleased to announce its second solo exhibition for the realist artist, Frank Kirk. A master storyteller, Kirk paints scenes from mysterious and ambiguous narratives. This exhibition asks the question: What’s going on in the house across the street?
We’ve all done it – walked along through a neighborhood in the evening and looked in a window or two as the lights go on. We can surmise what’s going on in that house, but we can never really know.
Frank Kirk’s title painting, The House Across the Street, sets the stage of ambiguity for the rest of the exhibition; two well-dressed figures stand on either side of a made bed, caught in an apparently fraught moment. Lamps are lit, night has fallen outside, and the lights are on in the house across the street. Is anyone home? Are they watching the same scene we see unfolding in the bedroom? Who’s watching whom? Even though the scene is intimate, the figures are not entwined, creating a dramatic tension. Kirk’s paintings are voyeuristic, often nocturnal, and steeped in emotional ambivalence.
Much of the quiet and emptiness in Kirk’s work echoes the same elements found in the work of Edward Hopper – the master at creating unknowable narratives in a realistic manner. Kirk’s canvases, painted with precision and high color, never fail to delight and engage anyone looking for a good story. Sometimes, the stories veer off into the territory of Surrealism or Magical Realism, where fantasy mixes with reality in unexpected ways.
Frank Kirk studied at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. In 1984, after a long and successful career, Frank Kirk left the world of commercial advertising and began painting for himself full time. In 1996, he retired in Santa Barbara to live a private life. To this day, he continues to imagine the lives of others – those who live so close and yet so far away, in the house across the street.
