Douglas Kolk

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.