Over thirty years, Constance Kheel has developed a body of artwork that celebrates the interaction between drawing and color. The heavy texture of the work focuses us on the materiality of painting and beckons us to intensify our process of seeing.
Primary shapes such as circles and squares emerge and retreat, expand and contract, resembling astral objects in infinite space. Kheel's paintings portray both invented constellations of abstract forms and literal pieces of our own galaxy. Our attention to these handsome works on paper is rewarded with the same pleasure we feel when we recognize one more star in the night sky. Kheel's work is full of emotion and a reverence for nature; her paintings are objects for slow contemplation, almost for meditation. Her paintings are influenced by such modernists as Hans Hoffman, Jackson Pollock, and Morris Louis.
As the renowned art critic Michael Fried wrote, "Constance Kheel's paintings are sensuous, serious, expansive, deeply felt. They are also slow; they were made slowly and painstakingly, by the application of acrylic paint in thin layers, by the continual adjustment and readjustment of forms, colors and textures to one another, by acts of contemplation leading to countless decisions and revisions, and by a variety of techniques including painting with a brush, pouring thinned paint in translucent veils, and rotating and tilting the stretchers and papers in order to influence the flow of pigment."
Constance Kheel's work is in numerous museum, corporate, and private collections, such as the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut; Chase Manhattan Bank, New York City; Citibank, New York City; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, New York; Manhattan Savings Bank, New York City; the Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, North Carolina; National Gallery of Modern Art of the Dominican Republic; the Newark Museum of Art, New York City; and Southeast Banking Corporation, Miami, Florida. A graduate of Bennington College, Kheel was awarded a Fellowship Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1987. Constance Kheel is a long-time resident of Rensselaer County, New York.
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