99.1 x 68.6 cm
Ides Kihlen: Compositions features works from Kihlen's 100 years of creating and is the first comprehensive solo exhibition of her work in New York. The exhibition opens on Thursday, July 14th and runs through Thursday, August 26th.
Ides Kihlen’s childhood was spent on the banks of the Paraná River in the
Argentine provinces of Corrientes and Chaco. Painting has been a constant in Kihlen’s life, as has been her passion for music. It was after moving to Buenos Aires that she enrolled at the Escuela de Artes Decorativas (The National School of Decorative Arts) at the age of 14, giving rein to a vocation that she actively and enthusiastically continues to practice to this day at the age of 105.
Kihlen’s artistic process has been an eloquent expression of her personality.
She decided, before anything else, to be true to her own internal pace. She did not consider herself to be a professional artist, and therefore never attempted to forge a career as an artist. Furthermore, Kihlen is known to have destroyed much of her work and, for the most part, has neither titled nor dated her paintings.
While her acrylics and collages are mostly abstract and non-figurative, many
of the artist’s works contain references to music and lyrical compositions,such as the inclusion of hovering keyboard-like forms, clefs, and staves. Her
choice of color palette is at the same time both reserved but vibrant,
and her formal compositions oscillate between exuding a lively, playful
energy through incorporating geometric fragments, patterning, and
numerical traces, while also presenting windows of negative space that open
up into new dimensions where forms float freely across the works’ surfaces.
