RAC Spotlight | Kim Piotrowski

“Lost Laurels”, 2018. Acrylic ink, acrylic and flashe on canvas, 72” x 54”

The RAC is pleased to present Kim Piotrowski’s solo exhibition While Here. This is part of RAC’s Spotlight Exhibitionseries, which highlights artists who are part of the RAC community.

For sixteen years Kim Piotrowski has balanced parenting and art-making here in Riverside. In that time, she’s made hundreds of paintings and drawings, exhibited across the country and in Europe, while developing a vivid body of work notable for its fluid restlessness. Although defined as an abstract painter, she still depicts. Guns, crowns, beds, water and war are among her subject matter, but all congeal and melt into Piotrowsk’s marks — torqued, attenuated, with a graphic snap and deftness. Her touch is liquid and gentle. The overall effect, even in tiny pieces, combines intimacy with the monumental baroque. Mass spirals and space unfolds into painted worlds that are both tangible and enigmatic.

This site-specific exhibition will represent Piotrowski’s artistic growth and her personal balancing act. Every year of her life in Riverside will be represented in an installation that will fill the entire Freeark Gallery as well as our Flex Space. Old and new work will hang together, connected by marks—a visual thread formed by painting, drawing, writing and personal ephemera applied directly to the gallery walls. Our entire space will transform into a grand-scale embodiment of private experience — extroverted action depicting sixteen years of life, love, and painting.

–Anne Harris