“Tail to Tail” offers a comprehensive account of Michael Kvium’s work today, revealing his commitment to tenets that have dominated his artistic practice for the past several decades. While Kvium’s work has increased in clarity and color—his paintings from the 1980s and ’90s were chaotic, consistently hued in dark browns, whereas the new ones are a bit brighter—he still confronts taboos and grotesqueries of modern life, and always with a taste for the macabre.
The back room of the exhibition features forty-five small, square watercolors, all part of the 2011–12 series “Short Stories.” Beautifully arranged in a frieze, these present characters and symbols typical in Kvium’s art—naked deformed bodies, fried eggs, and puppets—and thus seem to function as a diary of his ideas and motifs. In the gallery’s main room are eight new oil paintings, one of which is a diptych titled Tail to Tail, 2012. The work portrays a grinning, red-dressed Catholic cardinal who points to the sky (his domain) and a black-dressed judge who points his finger toward the viewer, into the world (his domain). These two characters, connected by a rat tail, are grotesque, eerily illusionistic representations of degenerate authorities. This eerieness continues in a sequence of three paintings, collectively titled The naked eye on a well dressed lie, 2012, that speaks to the absurdity of human existence. They are hung like a triptych; the left-hand one portrays a skeleton in a black mantle holding a plate with dirty yellow lemons, while the middle one shows a priest gripping a child. On the right, a bald ballerina—interestingly possessing Kvium’s features—holds a pile of feces. A gifted technician, Kvium creates paintings and watercolors that make a strong first impact but whose shock quickly disappears. This seems to be an inevitable outcome of his mannered style: Despite the macabre subjects, his art is sociable and enjoyable.
