Kenneth Capps | Cycloids / Drawings

Quint Gallery is proud to announce Kenneth Capps: Cycloids/Drawings opening Saturday, July 27 at 7655 Girard Avenue. The exhibition will comprise several recent steel sculptures by the artist, as well as a selection of wall drawings, some ink on paper and others on cut, treated steel.

Throughout his prolific career as an artist, Capps explores how opposing forces create balance –always including only the most essential, in seeking a gestalt of wholeness. These essentials include the phenomenology of form: primarily its weight, materiality, and one's expectations of Capps work to assert its dimensionality in conjunction with one's own definition of time and space. Certain timeless considerations such as these have remained true, unifying over 50 years of his work. These works possess a pictorial clarification that seemingly simplifies and defines his intent for them as sculpture.  

This presentation will concentrate on his ongoing Cycloid series, wherein rectangular forms curve and continuously turn in on themselves, suggesting the endless ways a form can be analyzed or approached from. These low-lying floor sculptures expand and contract in volume, and are forced by the weight of gravity and material to seek literal balance. The Cycloids break free from the line and its continuous path, spinning out onto a new plane. 

Other new works involve the forms turning in – a feeling of collapse or enclosure. Nearly as if in the process of opening or closing, they suggest a delicate process which contradicts the weighty, immovable material that grounds the work. Capps characterizes this iteration of Cycloids by their capacity to wax and wane, resonating with their convex and concave surfaces. The surface texture remains in dialogue with nature, a constant of Capps’ outdoor work. The two-dimensional drawings, some preceding these sculptures by nearly 50 years, reinforce Capps interest in curvilinear forms, underpinned discreetly by punctilious foundations.

Kenneth Capps received his MFA at the University of California, San Diego in 1975, during which his work was acquired by the Storm King Art Center in upstate New York.  His work is now featured in permanent collections internationally, including the the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego and the Port of San Diego, Bayside Park in Chula Vista, CA; the Palm Springs Art Museum; the Oakland Museum Of California; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and the Alfred Schmela Sculpture Park in Dusseldorf, Germany, among many others. Capps has received several grants and awards, including The Engelhard Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and two Pollock/Krasner foundation grants. Many of his sculptures are sited on a 40-acre sculpture park built by the artist in Warner Springs, CA.