Ken Aptekar, Ken Aptekar Contemporary Conceptual Judaica Art Drawing Go Study Chasidic Rabbis, 1996

Details

Description

Ken Aptekar American (b. 1950) Go Know (Study) 1996 Graphite, white pigment, transparency film, and staples on paper Hand signed … Read more Ken Aptekar American (b. 1950) Go Know (Study) 1996 Graphite, white pigment, transparency film, and staples on paper Hand signed lower right sheet: 18 x 18 inches frame dimensions: 21 x 21 x 1 3/4 inches, wood frame with acrylic glazing Ken Aptekar is an artist who combines painting with text. He paints new versions of historical paintings and frames, bolting glass with sandblasted words to his painted panels. Aptekar’s work belongs to the tradition of painting, yet he brings to that tradition a recognition that paintings produce meaning only through their interaction with viewers. He investigates the nature of spectatorship. By “recreating” works of art in a painterly but utilitarian manner, Aptekar promotes viewers’ own narratives prompted by the image-text combinations. Born in Detroit, Aptekar received his BFA at the University of Michigan, then moved to Brooklyn to complete an MFA at Pratt Institute. Most recently, his work was featured at the Jewish Museum in Vienna, Austria, and in the Biennale Internationale d’Autun, in Autun, France. A major commissioned solo exhibition, NACHBARN (“NEIGHBORS”), 2016, was on view at the St. Annen Museum in Lübeck, Germany, including paintings with text, silverpoint drawings, and video all based upon medieval altarpieces in the St. Annen Museum’s collection. Previously, his work has been seen in solo exhibitions at the Victoria & Albert Museum in collaboration with the Serpentine Gallery (London), the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), Memorial Art Gallery (Rochester, NY), Centro da Cultura Judaica (Sao Paolo, Brazil), Musée Robert Dubois-Corneau (Brunoy, France), the New Museum (New York, NY), Douglas Cooley Gallery at Reed College (Portland, OR), Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State (State College, PA), Cummer Museum (Jacksonville, FL), and the Elaine Jacob Gallery at Wayne State University (Detroit, MI). In 2012 Aptekar’s work was the subject of a survey exhibition, ​“Ken Aptekar: Look Again,” at the Beard and Weil Galleries, Wheaton College, Massachusetts. He was in the show Words & Music with John Giorno, Cheonae Kim, Ken Aptekar, William Anastasi, Monique Prieto, Jane Callister at Michael Berger Gallery. He was featured in the book Looking Jewish: Visual Culture & Modern Diaspora by Carol Zemel about artists and cultural figures in interwar Eastern Europe and postwar America who blended Jewishness and mainstream modernism to create a diasporic art, one that transcends dominant national traditions. Ken Aptekar, Alter Kacyzne, Moshe Vorobeichic, Bruno Schulz, Roman Vishniac and works by R. B. Kitaj, Ben Katchor, and Vera Frenkel that explore Jewish identity in a postmodern environment. A solo exhibition of Ken Aptekar’s was at Wasserman Projects in Detroit in 2024. Aptekar is the recipient of two NEA Fellowships in Painting, a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Award, a Rockefeller Residency at Bellagio, several Djerassi Resident Artist Program awards, and a Jackson Pollock Lee Krasner Foundation Award. He lives with the writer Eunice Lipton and divides his time between Paris and New York. See less