Kevin Appel has long been fascinated with architecture as a subject matter and with the modern home as a parameter for his own exploration in painting and works on paper. While the new paintings represent a departure as described by Tobias Ostander elsewhere in this catalogue, Appel’s previous work shows affinities to an ongoing tradition of elegant, reductive abstraction in the work of artists and architects who, like Appel, have come of age in Los Angeles—the “ground zero” of modern residential design—from the 1940s to today. More significantly, Appel’s work is part of a pronounced generational engagement with the legacy of modernism that has emerged during the past decade wherein artists working in diverse media have simultaneously interrogated and engaged with the concepts, implications, and aesthetics of modern design and architecture.
