Kinke Kooi “Preventing the Sharp From Being Sharp”

SANDRA GERING INC. is pleased to present Preventing the Sharp From Being Sharp, Kinke Kooi’s first exhibition with the gallery. 

The interior world of Kinke Kooi is rich with associations. At once ultra-feminine, thoroughly organic, suffocating yet teeming with life, Kooi creates highly detailed microcosms that seem to flourish entirely on their own energy. Her palette consists mainly of pastels, pink being the most prominent, and frilly embellishments can be found everywhere. Introduced into this is a good deal of flora, either birthed from or growing over and through various organ-like shapes. The combination can be intense, as if each drawing were grown in a petri dish. Rather than being off-putting, the combination feels sensual, even orgiastic. 

Kooi’s sense of adaptability, a word she uses to describe her admittedly soft approach, can feel like a hothouse flower. Left to it’s own devices, each drawing flourishes profusely, surrounding, supporting and consuming everything in its vicinity, until its separate elements become inseparable. This obsessive incorporation of ‘other’ becomes a signifying feature in Kooi’s work, and one that the artist identifies a natural appreciation for. In fact, Kooi’s concept of ‘sheathing’, or preventing ‘sharpness’, can be found on several levels: miniature hidden texts, scenarios-within-scenarios, and the embrace of alternative viewpoints into one’s thinking all exist simultaneously in Preventing the Sharp.

Kinke Kooi was born in Leeuwarden, Netherlands in 1961 and studied at the Academy for the Visual Arts, Arnhem. She has exhibited extensively since 1987, most notably at the Museum of Modern Art, Arnhem, the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands, the Centraal Museum, Utrecht, the Portland Museum of Modern Art, Portland, OR, the Museum de Lakenhal, Leiden, Netherlands, the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA, the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY, the Dordrechts Museum, Netherlands, the Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT and the Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam, Netherlands. From 1998 through 2013, Kooi had five one-person exhibitions with Feature, Inc., Kooi’s previous representation in New York. The artist lives and works in Arnhem, Netherlands.