Jeffrey Konen (b. 1987, Houston, Texas, USA)
Jeffrey Konen is a Hawaii-based painter, collagist, curator and creative consultant. He earned his B.A. in Liberal Arts from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA (2010), and holds a M.A. in Africana Studies from New York University (2015). His thesis, “Racism, Freedom, and Political Violence in the Historical Consciousness of Contemporary Abolitionist Thought” is a work of art in and of itself and was supported by some of the most critically acclaimed scholars in their respective fields, such as Angela Y. Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
Konen’s artistic abilities are as strong as his intellectual ones. His process is site-specific in that he collects an array of materials and found objects in the varied places he paints to create highly textured, abstract paintings that reinvent and repurpose everyday objects into highly inventive compositions. He takes after the Arte Povera movements in Italy in the second-half of the 20th century, where simple and common objects can return us to our most human selves, challenging the existent hierarchies found in art and socio-political life. Konen’s work directly challenges the impulse in American contemporary art that focuses on reflective surfaces, opulent materiality, and commodity fetishism in the spectacle-based media grab which saturates our physical and digital worlds. He takes the flattened, the discarded, the things ultimately relegated to the dustbin and finds new ways of re-presenting these materials in paintings that reverberate with art historical references found in Abstract Expressionism, Arte Povera, Surrealism, and Neo-Dadism.
Konen is directly working in the intellectual space and projects that Postwar American and European artists in the 20th century found pertinent. At root in his artistic endeavors is to cultivate the humanity in the viewer by presenting many facets of the human condition in the material confluence of the remnants found at the intersection of domestic and industrial spaces. Art, for him, is a collage of a fractured past that weighs on the present.
His work tells a deeper story where collaged-painting becomes autobiographical travelogue; where remnants and textiles become painted surface. Imbedded in the compositions are material that reflect the distant places and people he has come into contact with, creating a visual narrative that is deeply abstracted while offering points of entry of a discordant textured materiality that leads the viewer into multiple areas of geography and place, folklore and history, photography and perspective, literature and current events. The array of materiality he brings to painting is a refreshing reminder that painting is made up of much more than pigment. Art and life are inextricably linked, for Konen, and the Art Station Haleiwa is proud to represent the work of an emerging American artist whose work will continue be felt for decades to come.