Keer Tanchak

JDJ is thrilled to present Keer Tanchak’s debut solo exhibition in New York at JDJ Tribeca.

In All Night Party Doves, Tanchak brings together two recent bodies of work: portraits of notable women, delicately painted with acrylic inks on canvas and paper, and a more recent series of portraits of dogs, thickly painted with oil on irregularly shaped aluminum. The subjects that Tanchak uses as inspiration are sourced from found images and film stills that evoke feelings of beauty, comfort, intimacy, or desire.

The works on paper and canvas appear as though they were painted quickly, with fast, confident brush marks, but in fact, Tanchak purposely slows down this process by combining many painstaking layers of ink washes and resistance methods, such as liquid frisket and masking agents. The luxuriously fluid effect of her painting technique suggests atmospheric openness, space and depth within the picture plane.

Tanchak’s use of aluminum recalls the retablo paintings on metal that were common in Mexico in the latter part of the 19th century, with their use of popular imagery painted on non-traditional substrates as a way to quickly distribute images of idols to the masses. The jagged edges of the aluminum stand in contrast to the voluptuous, expressive brush strokes that define the canine portraits.

Regardless of medium, Tanchak has an uncanny ability to coax a feeling of airiness and luminosity from within. Her energetic brushwork and mark-making convey a sense of speed—one can imagine that she is painting her subjects in a fleeting moment of their existence, almost mid-movement, rather than asking them to sit still.

Keer Tanchak (b. 1977, North Vancouver, Canada; Lives and works in Dallas, TX) received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2003) and a BFA with distinction from Concordia University in Montreal (2000). Tanchak’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including 12.26, Dallas, TX; Old Jail Art Center, Albany, TX; Best Western, Santa Fe, NM; the Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, TX. She won the Artist Fellowship Award from the Illinois Arts Council (2009) and the Brucebo Residency in Visby, Sweden (2003). Her work is in the permanent collection of several institutions, including the Dallas Museum of Art, the Brucebo Museum, Visby, Sweden, and the South Bend Museum of Art, Sound Bend, IN.