Kyle Thurman

Off Vendome is pleased to announce an exhibition of new drawings and sculptures from Kyle Thurman. In November of 2015, Thurman began a daily drawing practice employing charcoal, pastels, and swatches of seamless paper in order to make one drawing per day citing an image taken from the news. Through his selection of an isolated image and by scaling the figures to approximate human size, Thurman attempts to slow the process of consuming of digital information and to more immediately engage his own body with the digestion of this information that we most often encounter without any physical experience. Like much of the artist’s previous work, these drawings question the manipulation of materials and images and the affects produced by physical shifts of scale. The drawings depict people in fields of work that were once suggested to the artist as an adolescent as possible occupations – a soldier, an athlete, a priest, etc. When installed in a group, the individual drawings produce potential narratives different from the original image’s context.

Accompanying a selection of these drawings are two new sculptural works – a glass work that derives its form from an American folk-art picture frame made in the early 20th century by a migrant worker, along with an addition made to the architecture of the exhibition space.

Kyle Thurman was born in 1986 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and currently lives and works in New York. He received his BA in Film Studies and Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2009, was a guest student at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf from 2011 to 2012 and completed his MFA in painting at Bard College in 2015.