Roxy Paine, Apparatus : Kavi Gupta | 219 N. Elizabeth St. Chicago, IL, 60607

Kavi Gupta is proud to announce its first exhibition with New York based artist Roxy Paine titled Apparatus. Apparatus will be the inaugural exhibition at our newest gallery location at 219 N. Elizabeth St. and Paine’s first solo exhibition in Chicago.

Roxy Paine’s work has challenged the perception of visual language and how it affects the understanding of our environments since the genesis of his career in the early nineties. Focusing on objects and their fabrication, Paine strives to evoke a desire to understand how meaning can transcend through time, using our conventional relationships with the visual as an anchor for the exploration of truth. Highly acclaimed for his synthetic replicas of organic forms such as fungi and trees, intricately executed with impressive mastery and ingenuity, and his computer-driven machines programed to auto-produce works of art, Paine presents a complex arena where the balance between what we know to be true and what we can learn from a deeper contemplative observation is considered.

With Apparatus, Roxy Paine introduces a new series of large-scale dioramas. Inspired by environments designed to be activated via human interaction, a fast-food restaurant and a control room, the dioramas are hand-carved from birch and maple wood and formed from steel, frozen in time, void of human presence thereby making their inherent function obsolete. Paine transforms these environments and creates a contemplative experience where what is seen behind the glass lingers between the real and a shell of reality. The work prompts viewers to consider their pre-conceived knowledge of the mechanics and functions of both a fast food restaurant and a control room and open to the possibility of how this knowledge can, and will, change through time and context.

Paine has constantly innovated ways that address impervious knowledge and challenged it with almost impossible transformations and finding a balance in the inevitable changing nature of the world. Though human language relies heavily on social convention and learning, Paine strives to push the boundaries of that process. Paine’s dioramas, along with his previous bodies of work, serve as reminders of the knowledge and enlightenment that comes from actual, real, experience with our natural and fabricated worlds.