Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Kevin Appel. The exhibition will consist of seven small paintings and is the artist’s third show at the gallery.

For this project space show, Appel scales down his characteristically expansive paintings, reducing his canvases to more compact pictorial spaces. Though the artist continues to privilege the discourse of painting, architecture and design in his work, the decrease in dimension offers a newfound intimacy in the makeshift structures he assembles. Appel pushes his paintings of architectural constructions and their constitution to a new level of abstraction, flattening and repeating fragmentary forms in complex perspectives. Whether depicting a ‘home’ or some unknown ad-hoc American shelter, Appel reveals both the internal and external components of the buildings; those private and public surfaces are collectively cobbled together and exposed.

A combination of compiled protrusions emerges on the canvas, uniting frameworks of beams and supports, with a mosaic of textile motifs from the interior décor, and a façade suggested through the image of wood, wallpaper, fabrics, paint, and fractured windowpanes. Often the plumbing system is accounted for, with the errant pipe spouting out some liquid matter amidst these layered mounds. These small paintings also underlie a continuing shift in palette, eschewing Appel’s previous solid, monochromatically cool hues for a more vibrant patchwork of patterns with interspersed bright splashes.

Appel presents a multitude of views at once, broaching the architecture in its entirety. The sense of visual play is strong in these works, as panels and fragments rise and descend upon themselves problematizing the sense of space. It then becomes difficult to discern whether the heaps of debris are a resultant collapse and dissolution or are caught in a moment of convergence to create the emblematic structure