SALOMON EMQUIES Complex Systems

Michael Kohn Gallery is very pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist, Salomon Emquies.

Since the 1980s, Emquies has produced video, photography, paintings and drawings as his mixed media practice. Most famously, Emquies collaborated with Jean-Michel Basquiat on an experimental video work in 1983, Rodeo: Rammellzee, Toxic C-1, the Rhythm Lounge. This work has been shown at the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao; Mori Arts Center Gallery, Tokyo; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among many other venues. Emquies and Basquiat’s video is currently on view at the Musée de la Musique, Paris.

The thread that connects all of Salomon Emquies’ art is a profound interest in the compositional structure of painting, the balance of color across a canvas, and the resulting presence of abstraction in our natural world. In this new body of work, Emquies creates Surrealist-inspired abstract forms, sometimes loosely resembling the double helix of DNA, sometimes approaching the organic forms of William Baziotes’ Abstract Expressionism. In other works, the geometry of intersecting arcs produces a random order, like the notion of chaos theory, where patterns emerge amid disorder. In some paintings, the shapes of microscopic, intertwined filaments exist with a variety of organisms and elements, colors and tones. 

Within the works on paper Emquies’ shapes, forms, and lines move and dance in a freer manner. The pastel drawings in this series continue the exploration of form and color balance, illuminating the immediacy of the artistic gesture, and often serving as inspiration for a later painting. 

"A complex system is an arrangement of a great number of related but various elements with intricate relationships and interconnections.” 

-Salomon Emquies