William Eckhardt Kohler

The Catskills is pleased to present Across the Threshold I Belong a solo exhibition of recent paintings by William Eckhardt Kohler, curated by Kyle Staver and Janice Nowinski.

Threshold implies both intimacy and a grand passage. It infers the way that so many of us in the last two years have been experiencing greater than usual confinement within the threshold of the home. Threshold also refers to how each of us chooses to live our life daily, and to that final threshold of our passing from this world.

Visually inspired by drawings made in the natural world, the studio and museums, each painting is intended to serve as a threshold into a world of myth and mystery.

Doors, passages, stages, windows, shores, rivers, fields, corridors, mirrors, paintings and the heart are all images and/or spaces that abut onto, begin with or include a threshold, real or imagined.

Through the paintings in this exhibit Kohler explores these motifs as symbols of transformation and initiation. They are conceived as a journey into the underworld, meeting the Self, touching grief and joy, loss, death, and ultimately love.

Born in Boston in 1962, Kohler has exhibited internationally including in New York, Chicago, London, Paris, and Charlotte, NC. He is the recipient of a Pollock- Krasner Grant in 2020, and attended the DNA artist residency in Provincetown, MA in 2019. He has taught drawing, painting, and art history at numerous schools including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, American Academy of Art, and at Indiana University Northwest.

During the last two years he has been traveling nomadically between New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Vermont, the Oregon coast. He keeps a studio in Chicago as well as Long Island City in New York.