Ansel Krut

domobaal is very much looking forward to presenting Ansel Krut's fifth, and maybe sixth (to follow on directly afterwards) solo exhibition with the gallery, this autumn. This will be an opportunity to revisit some of the paintings first shown at the gallery 20 years ago together with newer work.

Ansel Krut: "Twenty years ago I used to go for breakfast at a cafe on the Kingsland Road near my studio. It was used mostly by truck drivers and was always full of cigarette smoke. You could get: bacon, eggs, chips, 2 slices of toast and tea for £2.50. It always seemed to be raining and the passing traffic, which was incessant, sprayed up a fine polluted mist to knee height. Looking outwards from inside the cafe large letters saying "YAWA EKAT RO NI TAE" arched across the whole of the plate glass window at the front (this is "EAT IN OR TAKE AWAY" seen from behind). I was deliriously happy because I had a day of painting ahead of me.

The paintings I made at the time are the ones on show here, and they were, in fact, all exhibited first domobaal gallery. I'm keen to see how they look now; whether they have stood up. When I made them they looked like a wild departure from my previous work and they were met with opprobrium. But the seeds for their making were always there, just buried. I'd spent the previous 20 years trying to learn how to paint the appearance of things, mostly figures, but with limited success, because some of the hidden life of whatever I was trying to paint always wanted to burst through. So then, in my 40's, I felt I had to start to paint less about appearances and more from the inside out, the back to front–ness of stepping into the image and looking outwards.

One more recent painting, 'Faces on Noses' from 2019 has been included to facilitate the conversation between then and now.

"Ansel Krut's extraordinary paintings take us back to 20th century existential angst and its unending inquiry into identity, fate, and self–determination. His painterly style may seem casual, crude, and ludic, but this is work of high seriousness and deep moral content." (Alfred Mac Adam, The Brooklyn Rail, New York, May/June 2019)

"Amongst fearful iconographic contingencies, such a quietly composed technique quietly nudges the viewer towards the deeper pleasures of the engaged gaze: the compound act of looking, thinking, and translating from painterly matter that reminds us how we differ from animals, and how we might potentially differ more… Somewhere near the heart of this, one feels, is a generalised horror of instability – the possibility that anything is possible, any shift at any moment, even unto self–consumption – and an attempt to use painting, in all its remarkable mutability, as a method of both diagnosing and acclimating to that horror." (Martin Herbert, from 'Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking' written for the pocket–book Hotel Vinegar, published by domobaal editions, to accompany Ansel Krut's solo exhibition, September 2006)