JUNE 12th - JULY 24th 2021

M. LeBlanc is proud to present Rain or Shine, an exhibition of new paintings from the German-born Chicago-based artist Paula Kamps.

Working as a poet and a painter, Kamps focuses her work on recollection, fabulation, and the perception of narrative. Unhinging the artist's expected role as the operator of signification or meaning, Kamps' works joyfully dawdle in a space of transposition between what is read and what is seen, between what is felt and what is thought.

From washes of colored ink across linen, Kamps' builds strange reveries, often uncomfortable, often feeling incomplete. They frame the work of the artist as a narrator whose recollection is disjointed, piecemeal, or to a further extent, occluded by the passage of time.

It is in this trying space, the negative space that lacks connecting with one’s own memory or one’s own knowledge of self, that Kamps uneasily grounds the work's aesthetic structure. Each new painting then dashes the diaristic and the visionary, casting light on both as merely genres for a playful casting of what may be.

Kamps wet-on-wet ink on canvas technique serves to strengthen her gambit. A two-part studio process requires a certain undecidedness regarding the eventual outcome of the work. Figures and faces are formed out of spills of color, arms and hands emerge from masses of pigment.

Throughout Rain Or Shine, Kamps leaves indexical markers that serve to express the finitude of moments. Whether it is a carousel horse, a fence, a key, or a leaf, each is proffered as a token that unveils the false manner of how we grasp at our experiences and feelings, as if they are immanent things which can be owned, enclosed, and reproduced at will. Studying the emotive in this sense, Kamps is able to probe larger ontological questions regarding how one makes sense of not only being in the world, but rather that 'being' is forever contingent upon 'being with'.

Paula Kamps (b. 1990 in Cologne) is based in Chicago. Select recent exhibitions of Kamps' work include At The Pawn Shop (2021) at sans titre (2016) in Paris, Ganze Tage in den Bäumen (2019) at Kunstverein Heppenheim in Heppenheim, Germany, Ein Tun ohne Bild (2018), curated by Christian Malycha at the Kunstverein Reutlingen in Reutlingen, Germany, and I can bite the hand that feeds me and gently caress it too (2018) at Carbon 12 Gallery in Dubai. Kamps graduated Meisterschülerin from Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 2016, having studied under Tomma Abts and Elizabeth Peyton. Rain or Shine at M. LeBlanc marks Kamps' first solo exhibition in Chicago and the United States.

Curriculum Vitae