Of An Instance, in partnership with The Andy Warhol Museum and Presented by Hugo Boss.

150 11th Avenue (between 21st and 22nd Streets)

5/4/2012 – 6/3/2012

THE FAME PAINTINGS

Kost’s celebrity paintings–silkscreened on large-scale canvases from Polaroid images–are paired here with Polaroid facsimiles by Andy Warhol from the 70s and 80s. Both artists share an inquisitive lust to understand fame in all its dramatic guises and extravagant poses. Occasionally they share a subject–Liza Minnelli, Dolly Parton, Keith Richards–though Kost approaches these iconic individuals from a very different perspective. In some cases they are obscured or abstracted; occasionally disembodied, as with Madonna’s head, which appears to float on a sea of silver, or Grace Jones, who dissolves into a beautiful haze of flowers and tapestries. By translating his original photographs into these slick yet gritty canvases, Kost has given his unique vision a new sense of monumentality. In these works, which came from his Polaroid photographs, celebrity is both celebrated and complicated. We see the mobs of paparazzi themselves, clamoring for a shot, and the polarized finish of the paintings themselves is simultaneously glamorous and anti-glamor–just as Beyonce here appears both as a superstar and a sort of monster, caught in the camera’s flash. Like his forbearer Warhol, Kost is a participant in the world he depicts and also somewhat of a voyeur, diligently capturing all the madness and the romance of celebrity, all the while translating a sense of intimacy and access.

ABSTRACTED REALITIES

Kost’s Polaroid collages are again paired here with single Polaroid images by Warhol from the 70s and 80s. Kost takes a nod from the godfather of contemporary art while exploding notions of perspective with his elaborate installations, sprawling and almost sculptural arrangements. Warhol’s cheeky images of statuettes at the Last Supper are complemented by Kost’s equally irreverent tableau of holy drag queens in impending matrimony; a Warhol portrait of John Waters’s star Divine joins Kost’s collage of  BoomBoom, bare-chested and posed before a wall of Lady Gaga posters, mirroring her gesture. For Kost, the background landscape—from city skylines to lurid street murals—is just as vital as the collages’ equally colorful subjects, a dual investigation into the idea of facade (both of character and of place) . These works confound our expectations, trick the eye, and titillate.

ANYONE OTHER THAN ME

This group of new paintings grew out of a live performance Kost staged with two well-known drag queens, Sharon Needles and Vercua la’Pirhana, at the Capitol Skyline Hotel in Washington D.C. in January, 2010. A real-time video feed from three surveillance cameras in the queens’ hotel room recorded their elaborate personal transformations from boys to rockstars—putting on make-up, outrageous guises, and emotionally evolving—before they joined the party downstairs to applause.  Here, Kost has translated frozen moments of this performance into paintings, some of them purposefully enigmatic (a hand holding an eyelash curler which also carries an ominous connotation) and others gently subversive (Needles examining herself in the mirror, wearing a life-size body condom, while a football game plays on a nearby television.) If the artist’s initial performance video was born from a documentary impulse, these works memorialize the drag queens’ transition to monumental greatness, through a grainy, mysterious lens.

THE MALE FORM

Warhol explored a fascination with the male anatomy through Polaroids that cropped and focused on specific elements of the body: the rippling muscles of a young model’s back; the broad shoulders and thin waist of a man shot from behind; a young Sly Stallone, bare-chested and gazing seductively at the camera. Kost’s own series focuses on what the artists playfully terms “boys”—young models on the cusp of manhood, innocent yet coy (see the piñata saved from destruction ) A previous show of Jeremy’s work with young men, Were Were All Innocent Once, directly looks at the question posed… when are we innocent, at what point do we lose it, and were we ever.  These collaged portraits are eclectic and idyllic, capturing nude lakeside revels, dejected-looking skate punks, and self-assured studs, while in a series of double-exposure photographs, we’re treated to dream-like, disorienting portraits, further evidence of how Kost continues to push the boundaries of the Polaroid medium to it’s limits.