SOLO EXHIBITION | JACKSON, WY
Altamira Fine Art Jackson is pleased to welcome Todd Kosharek for a unique dual series solo exhibition opening May 28, 2019.
Join us for an Artist Reception and presentation on Saturday, June 1st from 4:30-7:30pm.
Todd Kosharek believes in beauty. Not the artificial, magazine-cover variety. Rather, “the beauty that makes people feel alive.” The beauty he recognized in reading about a Syrian man who, after fleeing his war-torn home, planted a garden outside his tent in a refugee camp. The beauty he sees in the history of Japanese origami cranes and their transition from a form of prayer into a recognized symbol of peace. The beauty he sees in the towering flower gardens his father tends.
Within these blooming beds, his father raises monarch butterflies. Last summer, Kosharek witnessed the monarch metamorphosis and even held one butterfly in his hand for an hour, studying the details of the butterfly’s every movement as it gathered strength after emerging from chrysalis. An hour of intimacy, of stillness before the butterfly fluttered away.
That profound experience inspired his latest series of paintings—a rumination on the attraction between place and people. Titled Nectar, the solo show runs from May 28 through June 8 at Altamira Fine Art. Love, like nectar, is the force binding all beings together. Yet like his concept of beauty, his visualizations of love are layered. He is complicating his compositions with elements of transformation: his origami cranes are now pieces of personal texts (a love letter from his wife, a note by his oldest son now six) and monarchs alight in multiples. The love expressed is the nectar attracting the butterflies to the cranes.
In a parallel series of landscape paintings, he explores the power of place—his adopted home of Jackson Hole for the past 18 years. The decision to raise his family in the Tetons—immersed in natural grandeur yet exposed to geographic and economic extremes—evidences his enlightened approach to vulnerability—the soil from which love thrives. “Nectar is a very personal, self-examining collection of work,” Kosharek says. “I hope it opens people to the same sort of strength of vulnerability. That’s to me the nectar that attracts the butterflies to the intimacy of the cranes and attracts people profoundly to a place.”
For more information on Kosharek and his solo show at Altamira, please contact the gallery by email (connect@AltamiraArt.com) or phone (307-739-4700).
Pre-sales available.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Through paint, Todd Kosharek contemplates life, exploring fundamental dynamics of memory, place, time and existential philosophy. Through his ongoing origami crane series, he considers the ancient Japanese prayer tradition of folding 1,000 canes. His meticulous treatment of this ritual raises important questions for the viewer: What is life? What is peace? What is my role in all of this? He embraces different philosophical tenants by pursuing distinct projects—peace, perception, history—all through his talent for realistic symbolism.
Raised in rural southern Wisconsin within a family supportive of his instinctual creativity, he began exploring art at the age of 13 and has devoted himself to painting ever since. At the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, he earned a bachelor’s degree in Art History, focusing on late 18th to mid-20th century painting, a purview that instilled within him an appreciation for technique, tonality, color theory, composition, and most importantly, historical awareness of the importance of integrating art into the fabric of society. Because of this understanding, he seeks to explore common themes that bind humanity: love, desires for understanding, of peace, of feeling connected to things larger then oneself. His work lives in major private and public collections throughout the United States and Europe.
“What I love in painting, both as an artist and as a viewer, is the feeling I get from seeing something that was meticulously created by pigment and brush. I want to see time – time taken by the painter to think, feel and create – but also the element of time, as if the painting is not frozen as an image but will grow and change with me as a person as I grow and change.”