Artists Space

Emerging Curators Series:
Never Learn Not To Love

March 1 – May 9, 2004

Project Space

Kaye Donachie’s modest-scale oil paintings depict counterculture revolutionaries and other nonconformists: young people in gangs, cults and communes. Recalled as if from the artist’s memory or personal recollections, the figures are blurry, their faces often obscured by wind blown locks, and their bodies articulated by loose brushstrokes. Teenagers are poised languidly in a state of waiting, evoking a sense of loss and a yearning for beauty and tranquility. Moody colors, often fused with a garish yellow light, create an eerie and otherworldly atmosphere. The sentimental titles of the paintings, borrowed from various pop song lyrics, add another layer of nostalgia and intrigue to the scenes portrayed.

Curated by Lisa Ivorian Gray, as part of the Emerging Curators Series.

Never Learn Not To Love is Kaye Donachie’s first exhibition in the United States. A graduate of the Royal College of Art, London, Donachie’s small–scale oil paintings form part of a current resurgence of figurative painting in contemporary art. Kaye Donachie was included in the first Prague Biennale, Peripheries Become the Centre, Veletrzni Palac, Prague, 2003, and has exhibited in Yes! I am A Long Way From Home, Wolverhampton Art Gallery; The Nunnery, London; Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland; K.I.A.D., Canterbury, and Dirty Pictures, The Approach, London.