Kim MacConnel is an influential artist in the Pattern and Decoration Movement of the 1970s. Working with design elements, MacConnel has made frivolity a fine art. Taking cues from Picasso and the so-called “primitivists,” MacConnel has taken the primitive and made it relevant in different dialogues between cultures. MacConnels’ paintings may look as though influenced by the Cubists, which they are, but there is a deeper meaning below the surface based in the materials he uses, and the meeting place he creates through cross-cultural interactions.
Excerpt from Artist’s Statement for Woman With Mirror, 2007
…. I have thought about Picasso before and he has been an important conversational node in my thinking in at least three bodies of work over the years. In 1994 I based a body of work, “Age of Plastic,” on the early abstract sculptural work of Picasso, Gonzales, Miro, and others that presaged the “Age of Steel” ushered in by World War I (and the Title of the exhibition by the same name at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1992, which gave me the idea)….
…. In 1989 (and somewhat more specific to this current interest in painting) I off handedly titled a 2 month trip to West and Sub-Saharan Africa “In Search of Picasso’s Ghost,” that resulted in a body of work that tried to link Picasso’s use of West African tribal masks, seen at the Musee de ’l’Homme in 1894, as “subject” for his developing interest in “abstraction,” with my snapshots of the actual everyday life of modern Africans as the “fabric” that supports (or in this case contrasts) the strangeness of that early “subject.”….
.… A third, and I think significant, engagement with Picasso’s work was related to the French art fair FIAC (Foire International d’Art Contemporain), in Paris in 1992, at the Gran Palais. I designed the booth, for Holly Solomon Gallery, around an article by the art historian Patricia Leighton on Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” the popular reaction to the French Government’s complicity in the African colonial atrocities of the 1890’s, and the World’s Fair of 1896, in Paris, for which the Gran Palais (and Petite Palais)–all steel girders [from Central African Iron Ore] and glass–was constructed as part of the “Jardin d’ Acclimatation,” which was the center piece of the French exhibition featuring French colonial “villages” constructed and occupied by the colonial native “builders” for the duration of the year long fair….
“What marks MacConnel as an original is his shameless embrace of decoration and the messiness with which he manifests his vision of a world run riot with dots, dashes and zigzags. His spirited assaults to highbrow sanctimony are loudly and liberally interspersed with sinuous lines, slapdash shapes and simplified renditions of bounty, beauty and leisure…” — David Pagel, Art in America, February 2004
