Kevin Teare

KEVIN TEARE (Indianapolis, 1951).
"Barbizon," 1976.
Oil and acrylic on paper.
This work is registered on the artist's website.
Signed, dated and titled in the lower right area.
Measurements: 55 x 56 cm; 61 x 62 cm (frame).
This work belongs to a series of paintings such as "Belle Laide" from 1976 or "Chinua for Chinua Achebe", in which the artist incorporates horizontal layers by superimposing the materials as if they were trellises. The resulting compositions cannot have one without the other. Inspired by a trip to New York City's SoHo neighborhood in 1974, Teare took the exposed mortar and turned plaster walls he saw in artists' lofts as a springboard for his imagination. Returning to Indiana, he began to appropriate the materials and visual sensibility conceived in the previous decade. However, as he observed the art he made, it became clear that he was already seeking more elaborate means of expression. Feeling that it was no longer enough to simply adopt industrial materials or to work geometrically in purely sculptural or two-dimensional forms, he seems to have appropriately captured the transformation that was occurring at the time in the work of the Minimalists.
Kevin Teare had his first exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum in 1975. At the age of 25 he received the National Endowment for Painting Fellowship and has since exhibited in museums and galleries on a wide level, in fact recently the Richmond Museum of Fine Arts in Virginia has acquired work by him for the collection. He attended Culver Military Academy, Ball State University, Indiana University and Bard College. Although primarily a visual artist, Teare has participated in several musical projects. In 1975/76 he played drums in the influential proto-punk band MX-80 Sound. In New York he also played with artist Julia Heyward in Glo-National in 1981. In 1991-93 he performed with Brian Kelly, Julia Murphy and Pat Place. In 2012, Teare curated Open For The Stones, vol. 2 at Harper's Books in East Hampton, New York. The theme of the exhibition was: visual artists who have had a significant relationship with music. The earliest works for which Teare is known are the mortar and lattice paintings from 1975 to 1980. The "lattice" paintings were first shown at the now defunct Belmont Gallery on South Washington St., in Bloomington, Indiana, circa 1974-1975 and then at the Monroe County Library in Bloomington, Indiana, before being exhibited in Indianapolis and New York. These were exhibited at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and 55 Mercer Gallery in New York at the behest of sculptor Julius Tobias. In 2007 they were exhibited at the Islip Art Museum for the "Surface Impression" show. Beginning in the early 1980s, his work took a decidedly more political turn, resorting to the use of military and world history and the use of symbols, flow charts and cartography as part of the painted compositions. The first of these works were shown in 1982 at P.S.1 in an exhibition curated by Marcia Tucker called: "Critical Perspectives".