SAATCHI GALLERY
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SELECTED WORKS BY Douglas Kolk



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Douglas Kolk

Angels wear tube socks

2005
Collage and mixed media on paper

60.6 x 48.1 cm

Douglas Kolk’s collaged drawings are rendered with unfocussed obsession. His poster-sized work broadcasts a chaotic media: displaced figures, consumer logos, and fairytale ghoulies abound in his channel-surfing style abstraction. Through his fragmented compositions, Kolk captures a youth culture zeitgeist: his images presenting fragile and fluctuating notions of identity and corrupted innocence.

Drawing influence from comic books and pulp novel covers, Kolk’s drawings are pieced together as narrative frames, some, such as Poppy Takes Flight… and Last Seen With Trixie, offer clearly defined stories while others meld in an associative blitzkrieg of confetti information. Illustrating a psychological terrain where haircuts and trainers take equal footing with still-lives, serial killers, and film stills, Kolk offers a discomfiting reassurance in contemporary anxiety.

Drafted with disparate drawing styles, Kolk’s work physically encapsulates this sympathetic syndrome. Vying between OCD and ADS, forms range from the poetically detailed to the violently doodled; his sentiments overlapping in precarious schizophrenic balance. Positing media clippings with delicate sketches and bold painterly abstraction, Kolk contrives an alluring slippage between reality and distortion, his work entrancing with confessional intimacy, disclosing compulsive beauty in the hollow and salacious.


Douglas Kolk

Devil under Greenwood Falls

2005
Collage and mixed media on paper

45.9 x 30.3 cm


Douglas Kolk

Hi Bye

2005
Collage and mixed media on paper

50.6 x 38.1 cm


Douglas Kolk

Party Dress

2005
Collage and mixed media on paper

50.6 x 38.1 cm


Douglas Kolk

Frosted hair Ivory Tooth (1 of Polyptych

2005
Collage and mixed media on paper

38.5 x 30.5 cm


Douglas Kolk

Strawberry Blonde stripped shirt (2 of Polyptych

2005
Collage and mixed media on paper

38.5 x 30.5 cm


Douglas Kolk

Poppy takes flight in the airport Bathroom before she leaves the ground (3 of Polyptych - Brujeria Rules)

2005
Collage and mixed media on paper

38.5 x 30.5 cm


Douglas Kolk

Last seen with Trixie (4 of Polyptych - Brujeria Rules)

2005
Collage and mixed media on paper

45 x 37.5 cm


Douglas Kolk

Keep your oily son away from my daughter

2005
Collage on paper

125 x 100 cm


Douglas Kolk

Help me Nasa!

2005
Collage on paper

97 x 81 cm


Douglas Kolk

Swany

2006
Collage and mixed media on paper

105.5 x 91 cm


Douglas Kolk

Wear am I Soda?

2005
Collage and mixed media on paper

80 x 62.1 cm


Douglas Kolk

Leave your favorite sneakers behind

2006
Collage and mixed media on paper

129 x 90cm


Douglas Kolk

Big Eye Country

2006
Collage and mixed media on paper

180 x 121.5cm


Douglas Kolk

the girl called Grand Slam

2006
Collage mixed media on paper

182 x 151.5cm


Douglas Kolk

We're all monsters Frankie

2006
Collage and mixed media on paper

170 x 134cm


Douglas Kolk

Nurse City

2007
Collage on paper

189.2 x 189.2cm


Douglas Kolk

Teeth Everywhere

2007
Collage on paper

235 x 185.4cm


Douglas Kolk

Where You Went

2007
Collage on paper

188 x 210.8 cm



ARTIST INFORMATION




ARTICLES



Douglas Kolk

Douglas Kolk was born in Newark, USA in 1963. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany and New York. The artist's work has been exhibited internationally since 1992 and is now represented in numerous public and private collections.

His body of work probes the issue of identity and the multifaceted nature of the human psyche. For Douglas Kolk drawing offers endless possibilities for exploring and interrogating this theme. The artist has developed a highly individual style. Although he greatly varies his choice of materials, the drawings are always recognizable.

Having begun with small drawings on paper, Douglas Kolk developed large-format works on paper and distinguished himself with his works on canvas and his Wall-drawings. His confident line creates figures that seem familiar to us but ultimately resist definite identification. The artist playfully takes up narrative elements from fables, comics and television-series and incorporates them into his work. The result is a language that is universally comprehensible but nevertheless retains an element of mystery.

The artist's work has a direct, sensitive and authentic effect on the viewer. Yet, Kolk allows enough freedom for the recognition of our own ideas, wishes and desires within the drawings and figures.

Read the entire article here
Source: artmag.com
 


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