I always find out about really interesting artists right after they have exhibited. As is the case with Bill Kane. He just completed an exhibit, Suprematist Nudes, at Modernism in San Francisco.
Kane's work offers us many new ways to look at the female nude. Now, we find ourselves looking at the form through a retro-Suprematist lens. This would, I think, really irritate the father of Russian Suprematist painting, Kasimir Malevich, who believed in form over figure. Malevich once said:
"Honor to the Futurists who forbade the painting of female hams, the painting of portraits and guitars in the moonlight. They made a huge step forward: they abandoned meat and glorified the machine."
Regardless of what Malevich might think of Kanes' "female hams", I find that the results are almost always pleasing.
But Kane explains it so much better than I do:
"Currently I am working on a series of images of Nudes montaged with images of Russian Suprematist painting from 1912 to 1923. The Suprematists wanted to divorce their art from the physical world and explore relationships of a higher, "Supreme" reality. I thought it interesting to combine works from opposite polarities; physical nudes with these hard-edged geometric explorations to see what relationships would result. The "tattooing" of the Suprematist works on some of the Nudes makes them almost archetypal presences of an idealized form: no longer merely physical entities. In other images the Nude softens the hard-edged Suprematists forms making them more physical and worldly. These new relationships, I hope, give a heightened sense of the "beingness" underlying both."
