This exhibition pairs two SLATE artists who use vertical and horizontal planes to build composition in their paintings, Maya Kabat and Andrzej Michael Karwacki.
ABOUT Maya Kabat
Maya Kabat’s abstract oil paintings reference the urban landscape of Northern California, exploring relationships between architectural elements, California light, and the balance of color, line, plane, and space. Inspired originally by Diebenkorn’s work, Kabat often works intensely on the edges of her canvases, incorporating the external form of the object into the internal dialogue of the piece. She also usually leaves a quiet empty space in the middle of the canvas, giving absence and ground a prioritized position usually reserved for subject and form.
Unlike Diebenkorn, however, Kabat focuses intently on the physical surface of her work, mixing colors directly on the canvas to build up the image using drywall and plaster tools. Working within a limited amount of time while the paint is still malleable, she achieves a result that represents both empty space and solid forms and perfectly balances spontaneity with structure.
Maya Kabat has a B.A. from Oberlin and an M.F.A. from UC Davis. She has exhibited at the SFMOMA Café Museo, Claude Lane Gallery (SF), Mercury 20 Gallery (Oakland), Rogers Gallery (Portland), the Dairy Center for the Arts (Boulder), Bedford Gallery (Walnut Creek), and SLATE contemporary (Oakland). Her work appears in numerous public and private collections, including Nieman Marcus, Cisco Systems, Kaiser Permanente, Stanford Healthcare, and the Hotel Adagio. In 2015, she was awarded an artists residency at the Flotstunga nature preserve in Iceland. Maya Kabat currently lives and works in Berkeley, CA, and is represented by SLATE contemporary in Oakland.
ABOUT Andrzej Michael Karwacki
Andrzej Michael Karwacki draws his ideas from Buddhist philosophy, working with an intention of equanimity where it is neither a thought nor an emotion. He creates works of art where the painting expresses immeasurable moods suggested through his use of color and composition. In his Equanimity Redefined series, Andrzej cuts up paintings on panel, recombining them into a new composition. The resulting work presents a complex array of painting techniques, treatments, and color, in a rhythmic stripe pattern. While details are compelling and draw viewers in for discovery, the linear and narrative aspect keeps the eye moving across, reading the composition like a book that can be read repeatedly with new nuances coming to the fore each time. In his Chronicle Series, Andrzej adds one more dimension to the process, including strips of collages made from newspapers and magazines to bring fragments of imagery and text into the composition. The collage also serves to ground the work in time and place, with references to San Francisco, Art, Design, and the Bay Area’s contemporary lifestyle in most of them (a few recent pieces incorporate material from European newspapers). These works are unique in that they successfully bring two very different artistic styles, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, into one cohesive composition.
Andrzej Michael Karwacki moved from his native Poland to the United States to study Fine Arts and Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1984. He moved to the Bay Area in 1994 and has exhibited extensively at Hang Art Gallery, ARC Gallery, Misho Gallery, Secession Art and Design, Minna Gallery, Wonderland, and Mezzanine in San Francisco among others; at the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek; Jules Place in Boston; and at SLATE contemporary in Oakland. His work is in private collections internationally and his work is shown regularly at art fairs in London, New York, Miami, and San Francisco.
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