New Front Teeth Kottie Paloma

Kottie Paloma will present his first solo exhibition, New Front Teeth, at the premises of the Gallery Ruttkowski;68 in Paris.

Paloma’s paintings, composed within the confines of a binary color scheme, create compositions that move between abstraction and representation. The compositions evoke suggestions of space, objects, symbols, and pure abstraction. These forms come together in tight, puzzle-like constructions that offer multiple entry points to the viewer, who can then find coherence out of the assemblage of contradictory parts. The artist builds these works on the basis of experiments, finding forms through a process of drawing and painting on scraps of paper that he then presses, as if printing them onto the canvas. This process allows him to maintain a sense of the looseness of his hand. The work straddles the line between graphic and expressionistic art, employing sparing methods to create vividly psychological compositions that suggest landscapes of the unconscious.

Paloma’s new series was inspired by his move from sunny Los Angeles to the dark, cold, grey winter of Germany, and the small wine village in Northern Bavaria in which he now resides. It’s a strange village, one where “people have new front teeth” — a fictitious explanation Paloma uses to describe why there’s so many dentists there. Most of the works in this exhibition make direct reference to the new surroundings Paloma finds himself in.

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