Kyle Staver: ERZÄHLERIN

Nino Mier Gallery is thrilled to announce Erzählerin, our second solo exhibition by New York-based artist Kyle Staver. The presentation will feature clay reliefs as well as a series of new oil paintings that estrange and intensify canonical fairy tales, leaning into the humor and preposterousness of tropes found in such stories while also tapping into their brutality. The exhibition will be on view in Los Angeles from May 18 – June 29, 2024.

Erzählerin, a German term for a female narrator, encapsulates the perspective reflected in Staver’s works. Drawing from fairy tales, which she describes as “the mother of [her] story life,” Staver's works both reference specific tales like Rapunzel and explore broader themes common to the genre.

Departing from her usual sources of inspiration, which often derive from the grand narratives of Greek mythology and biblical stories, Staver is fascinated by the ubiquity of fairy tales as cultural touchstones, offering insights into how we perceive and interpret the world. In this exhibition, Staver challenges conventional retellings of these tales, eschewing sanitized moral lessons aimed at children in favor of a more nuanced exploration of their implications.

In Erzählerin, many of the paintings are complemented by wall reliefs. These reliefs, now colored with acrylic paint for the first time, delve into the visual structure of each narrative. For example, in the Red Ridinghood works, a towering wolf bursts out of the relief’s frame, while in the accompanying painting, he looms over the young protagonist, who meets his gaze with an impish smile, as though concealing a secret from her aggressor. The oil paintings, created concurrently with the reliefs, maintain Staver’s signature luminous highlights and enveloping shadows. In contrast, the reliefs exhibit a rebellious quality, challenging the reverence of both the paintings and their predecessors.

Throughout the exhibition, Staver presents work that is both irreverent and enigmatic, offering a new perspective on narratives deeply embedded in our collective consciousness. Navigating through themes of femininity and masculinity, romance, identity, and morality, Erzählerin reinterprets narrative painterly traditions and the enduring legacy of fairy tales, injecting beauty, humor, and élan into stories that have almost become second nature to us all.