Lennon, Weinberg has been exhibiting the work of Richard Kalina since 1992. While certain aspects of the work remain the same – constructing paintings with a unique process of collage along with his sense of color – the works in this exhibition show Kalina creating an entirely interconnected body of work. It’s a different way of improvising within systems of his own invention that has long governed the creative logic of his work.

We asked Kalina to provide some insight into his intentions for the new work and have included his statement in the booklet published to accompany the show. In his own words:

The paintings are built from a toolkit of components – rearranged differently in each work or group of works: panels, bars, circles, complex linear connectors, and a variety of grounds. Certain things were carried over from my previous paintings – most of the paintings in the show are constructed, as they were in the past, from painted rice paper layered and collaged on canvas. It is a complicated and rather tedious process but it allows for a particular matte surface and transparent color (paired with plaster-like whites and blacks) that is very difficult to achieve in any other way. There is also a governing logic common to much of my earlier paintings – a way of putting a rational order on sets of intuitive processes. In this case, the number of the internal panels matches the number of the color bars (and no color bar repeats) and the circles always come in two of each color. But there are some major variations. A number of the works are monochromatic or bichromatic and are painted in oil on linen. In these works the focus is on the overall border of the forms rather than on the internal divisions. There are seven distinct series within the larger group.

Panamax, by the way, is the term for the size limits for ships travelling through the Panama Canal. Those constraints have shaped the dimensions and design of the different ships that now traverse the canal. The rules that Kalina has imposed on this particular cycle of work have had a similar effect in determining the resulting paintings.

Richard Kalina was born in 1946 and began showing his work in New York and elsewhere in 1969. His works are included in many museum collections including the Arkansas Art Center, Grey Art Gallery, Guild Hall Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, National Museum of American Art, Norton Gallery, Parrish Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Rutgers University Art Museum, the Wadsworth Atheneum and Yale University Art Gallery. Kalina is a respected art critic, a member of the National Academy and a Professor of Art at Fordham University in New York, where he teaches studio art and art history.