Kravets Wehby Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Lover’s Lair,a solo exhibition featuring a new body of work by Wendell Gladstone. Opening on Thursday, April 4th, and running through May 11th 2019.

The paintings in Lover’s Lair are a continuation of the artist’s exploration of liminal subconscious spaces. A wide array of rendering styles, surface textures, and an intense palette combine to create charged surreal environments where lovers hover in rapturous suspension.

Couples are depicted writhing in various states of interwoven embrace; entwined limbs contort to fill the looping architecture of braided wire and stain-glass animal forms they inhabit. These totem-like dwellings serve as cocoons providing protection, while also acting as a prism, simultaneously distorting and clarifying the emotions and activity of their knotted occupants. Bands of diminutive chameleon-like figures circulate along the peripheries: dancing, swimming, probing, consistently adapting to their settings, and facilitating the twisting ferment.

Wendell Gladstone (b. 1972, Boston. Lives and works in Los Angeles) received his BA from Brown University, an MFA from Claremont Graduate University, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.Wendell GladstonKravets Wehby Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Lover’s Lair, a solo exhibition featuring a new body of work by Wendell Gladstone. Opening on Thursday, April 4, and running through May 11, 2019. There will be an opening reception on April 4, from 6 – 8 pm.

Seduction and temptation play a key role in Wendell Gladstone’s new exhibition, Lover’s Lair. His figures writhe in interwoven embrace, with tangled limbs and charged emotion. The surreal environments he creates blend stained glass and architecture with reptiles and lovers. Gladstone’s complex surface textures and distorted figures culminate in chameleon-like forms. The paintings in Lover’s Lair are a continuation of the artist’s exploration of the subconscious space. A wide array of rendering styles, surface textures and an intense palette all combine to create complex dreamlike scenes of communal rapture.

Wendell Gladstone (b. 1972, Boston, lives and works in Los Angeles) received his BA from Brown University, an MFA from Claremont Graduate University, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has most recently been featured in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, New York Magazine, Art in America, Artforum, Architectural Digest, ARTnews, and Hyperallergic.