I am very happy to share this card announcement for my forthcoming major one-person exhibition, Interpolations, New Large-scale Work by Michael K. Paxton, that will open at the Evanston Art Center main floor gallery February 27 and run through April 4, 2021. An extensive brochure will be available at the exhibition and a virtual Artist Talk will take place March 5, 2021 from 5:30-6:30pm in support of this new work. This exhibition will mark my third major one-person museum scale exhibition of new work in four years and will also mark my 40th anniversary of showing in Chicago. This project is partially funded by a Grant from Columbia College Chicago, the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the EAC general membership.
Information on Raw Reckoning Opening and Exhibition →
Opening Reception: 6-9pm, June 7th, 2019
On display from June 7th-August 4th, 2019
Raw Reckoning is veteran Chicago artist Michael K. Paxton’s one-person exhibition of large-scale paintings and works on paper that derive their structure from the study of slide sections of the effect of black lung disease on coalminers. Paxton, a sixth generation West Virginian creates pillar size fields of chalk, charcoal, gesso and acrylic on raw canvas that embrace this ongoing devastation from coal in an effort to point to a place and people not heard from often in contemporary art. Through a well ingrained working process of size and materials, the open-ended approach of how each painting is developed produces a colorful and awkward work of aggressive mark making that refuses to stand still. Pushing hard against expectations an otherness surrounds his work as he looks for the exact point where his bone deep Appalachian heritage can carve out a place for a heart’s desire to speak of something important, personal and yet as common as dirt.
