David Bates: The Katrina Paintings at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, May 21-August 22, 2010. Alice Thorson has written about the exhibit in the Kansas City Star. You’ll also recall that Bates was one of the artists named by Roberta Smith as under-recognized in her challenge to NY museums and curators a month or two ago in the NY Times.
[...] David Bates’ Katrina Paintings. See them at the Kemper in Kansas City City through Aug. [...]
I can’t believe it’s 5 years already. May all the victims of Katrina have been blessed with new lives.
amen.
on another note, about the things actually in the gallery: i just went to see the show today. i have no doubts about the nobility of bates’s motives or anything. and the paintings do have a presence, mostly from scale and style (maybe not quite style of radical will, but at least style of pretty-alright will). but man, the skin tones especially and color in general are a huge letdown, which in many cases might be a minor flaw, but i think here it’s a big problem.
David Bates is a fine artist indeed, and I wrote an appreciation of the last 25 years of his work recently HERE. http://dulltooldimbulb.blogspot.com/2010/04/my-david-bates-retrospective-glorious.html Good, honest, painterly work. No wonder he was mentioned as an artist deserving more attention in the New York Times recently. I do not feel Bates Katrina works are his finest, but the show of them a few years ago in New York was worth the trip uptown many times over.
I went to the show and saw these and I like a number of them, and really enjoy a few. The ones I really liked were the empty street scenes flooded, or pile of cars trees whathave you.
In trying to figure out why I liked those more than the others ( I didn’t particularly like many of the portraits, his hand and ability feels more confident in the street scenes and clusters, while more stilted and appropritive in mark ), I thought about this eventually. What about the idea of disaster tourism, does that relate in any way to these paintings? I think it might. If so, then what? Does anyone care? Should they?
I read he had no real hard connection to New Orleans, I know he’s from Dallas so he’s close, but he never lived there. I also know many of the paintings are done from sketches made while watching CNN coverage of the flood. Does this matter?
Like I said I think a number of the paintings are beautiful, I want the book, but it feels a little weird and I don’t know if its supposed to.
Just some thoughts.
yah, I feel a lot the same. I really want to like the big figure paintings. They remind me of painters I really like, Max Beckmann and Lester Johnson, but just too many generations removed. Painters I really respect have mentioned how much they like Bates (people whose word holds a lot more weight with me than R. Smith), but I’m still struggling a bit.
Definitely agree about the non-figure scenes, maybe paint physically works with the imagery a bit more?
I just visited the Kemper this past weekend, and saw the sketches and paintings from this collection in person. They really stuck out to me, and I fell in love. I had never heard of David Bates before this weekend, but I wanted to learn more about him after seeing his work. Not only was the style very appealing to me, but the work felt very emotional, and moved me in a way that doesn’t happen all that often when I’m looking at art. Perhaps because the work is portraying the effects of an event that I am more familiar with, as it happened so recently.
I know this thread is a bit old, I only found it after searching for David Bates in posts here on wordpress. I wish there had been a little more discussion- I’d like to read more about some of the issues brought up, like the ‘disaster tourism’ point that kc painter mentioned.