Future Perfect, the current exhibition of Richard Kalina is different than any of his previous shows with Lennon, Weinberg since 1992. He has set aside his signature process of collaging cut and painted sections of paper over linen, and has turned his attention entirely to oil painting. The new paintings follow from a framework that defined his 2016 show here, in which musings on modernist architecture were realized in a series that included both collaged paintings and oil paintings. Those oils of silhouetted shapes were followed by an intermediate body of work in which the boundaries of the shapes were penetrated by patterns of bands, circles and grids.

Register and The Day Before Tomorrow are the titles of the two new series in this show, encompassing eight paintings and two watercolors. As Kalina describes them:

The recent paintings and watercolors build directly on work done in the past few years, but take matters a step further, amplifying the structural complexity of the preceding paintings and adding multiple colors and various recognizable forms. As with the earlier work, these paintings deal with architectural space and orderings -- presenting themselves as shifting combinations of plan and elevation. They are resolutely flat and planar, yet evoke three-dimensional space by overlaying and perspective, as well as employing the property of colors to advance or recede. 

We organized a survey exhibition of Kalina’s work in 2010 and included two from a body of work from 1980-81 in which a structure of patterning was an element of the paintings, which until recently were the last paintings he made with oil paint. Several from that early series are included in Pattern, Decoration & Crime, a comprehensive historical exhibition recently on view at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Geneva, Switzerland that will open at Le Consortium in Dijon, France in May 2019. 

Richard Kalina was born in 1946 and studied at the University of Pennsylvania. He began exhibiting in 1969 and has regularly shown his work in museums and galleries, both nationally and internationally. This current show is his twenty-fifth solo exhibition and his twelfth Lennon, Weinberg since 1992. Previously, he exhibited with Ivan Karp during the early years of OK Harris Gallery, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Piezo Electric, and Diane Brown. Kalina has been included in several important survey exhibitions of abstract painting, including both exhibitions titled Conceptual Abstraction, first at Sidney Janis Gallery in 1991 and in the exhibition that revisited that show which took place at the Hunter College Art Gallery in 2012. He is currently included in a European museum exhibition, Pattern, Decoration & Crime, which opened at the Musee D’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Genève, Switzerland, in October 2018, and opens at Le Consortium in Dijon in May 2019.

His works are included in museum collections such as the Arkansas Art Center, Grey Art Gallery, Guild Hall Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, National Academy Museum, National Museum of American Art, Norton Gallery, Parrish Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Rutgers University Art Museum, Springfield Art Museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum and Yale University Art Gallery. 

In addition to his work in painting and drawing, Richard Kalina is a well-known art critic, serving as a Contributing Editor at Art in America and regularly publishing articles in that magazine and others. He is the author of Imagining the Present: Context, Content, and the Role of the Critic, published by Routledge Press. Richard Kalina is Professor of Art at Fordham University in New York, where he teaches studio art and art history. He is a member of the National Academy of Design.