Ted Kurahara is an abstract painter born in Seattle and working in New York. His paintings, seemingly minimal, are very rich and alluring as a result of a thoughtful and meticulous layering of paint. The works address the strengths of silence and solitude. His recent exhibition Facing the Wall: Recent Abstractions was reviewed by Mario Naves in The New York Observer.
Mr. Naves wrote, “Ted Kurahara’s diptych paintings, at Walter Randel Gallery, mine stringent turf—symmetrical geometric structures that admit little wiggle room for the vagaries of individuality…
Brooding colors predominate, but it’s the scumbled pinkish tones in two single-panel paintings that divulge Mr. Kurahara’s romantic streak.”
Donald B. Kuspit has written that Ted Kurahara’s paintings have “ a manifest rational look, but tingles with irrational excitement– the latent sensuality built into the picture by the painting process…The generation of the effect of the unexpected within what seems a “predictable” surface is a major task of this kind of painting, a task Kurahara accomplishes exquisitely.”
Ted Kurahara received his art training in St. Louis and did graduate work in Peoria, Illinois before arriving in New York City in 1959. While working in the supportive and energized atmosphere of downtown New York, he showed at the Mi Chou Gallery, one of the first important Asian-American venues in America. He has exhibited world-wide, notably in France, Italy, Sweden and Switzerland, to great critical acclaim.
In essence, Ted Kurahara’s oeuvre speaks about quiet yet forceful persistence; there is in his work the desperate and successful search for the fundamental and the inaccessible. As the critic Jerome Sans noted, “All imperfection, all hesitation has been excised.” |
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