11.15.2022

Alex Kerr and Matt Momchilov on PLATFORM


We are thrilled to present new works by Alex Kerr and Matt Momchilov on PLATFORM, launching today, November 15.

Platform is the e-commerce destination for new works by today’s most sought-after contemporary artists. At the beginning of each month, Platform releases a new limited-time selection of artworks to buy now, selected in partnership with David Zwirner and sourced from the country's most exciting independent galleries.

Enquire on availability info@noon-projects.com

Alex Kerr (b. 1989) is an LA-based visual artist whose work explores ways of seeing and being seen. Using a variety of media, including oil, acrylic sheets, ceramic and wood, Kerr builds dizzying, technicolor worlds for himself to hide out in, or at least pretend to. This diverse body of work is steeped in uncanny, dramaturgic tropes — the harlequin, the vanity mirror, the curtain, the clown, the mask — icons of a stylized version of razzle-dazzle stage productions. These images comprise an existential iconography that questions the singular ways Kerr masks, or mascs, through the freedom and farce of daily performance. Where does the stage begin and end? Is the act catharsis or trap? Is there truth at the bottom of the lie? Utilizing repetition, redundancy and disquieting color & pattern, Kerr renders otherwise blithe scenes suddenly uncomfortable or embarrassing — distorted fun houses that veil Kerr’s darkest inquiries into authentic selfhood and idiosyncratic queer identity.

Matt Momchilov (b. 1986)  is an LA-based visual artist. After substantial commercial success and subsequent disenchantment with the art world, Momchilov took nearly a decade’s hiatus from his practice. This new body of work is an experiment in unlearning — an inquiry into a kind of creative sustenance that champions pleasure and play, spontaneity and imperfection, curiosity and surprise. These paintings, portraits of tender and effusive characters from the mall or the spirit world or the mythical American West, allow moments of joy into a medium inundated — and often strangled by — rigor. Though masterful in technique and stroke, these figures are awkward but riveting, arriving in a raw palette of ketchup reds and sandstone grays with contrasting pops and strips of jewel tones and raggedy patterns. There are cowboys and valley girls and hyper-masculine men made softer by the swaths of pale color that flank them, by the mysterious talismans who keep them company, be them balding angels or bright blue serpents or a half-painted banana bowl. The unfinished nature of the canvases keep the works in a constant state of becoming — a giant middle finger to a status quo who worships the bottom line, and to a past self whose inner critic held court. Opting for a soft grip over a heavy hand, Momchilov enters a kind of other dimension when he’s painting, choosing to discover, not invent: “I let them make me laugh. I let them tell me what’s next.”
Exhibition

November 15 – December 1, 2022