Anita Rogers Gallery is thrilled to present OUTSKIRTS, a solo exhibition of new drawings and encaustic paintings by John McDevitt King.
The artist’s name should be familiar to those of you in the diamond business, as John King worked at the Gemological Institute of America’s New York Gem Trade Lab from 1979, and was GIA’s chief quality officer from 2008 until just a few years ago. John is now focusing his knowledge of light in his art.
Anita Rogers Gallery
The exhibition will be on view April 23 through May 24 at 494 Greenwich Street, Ground Floor in New York City. The gallery has worked with the artist since 2023; this will be his debut solo exhibition in the space.
King’s work explores perception, memory, and the physical and mental spaces we inhabit and navigate; drawing on the artist’s life experience, interactions, observations, and extensive travel, the resulting works feel both familiar and dreamlike.
GIA
For many years, King worked as a gemologist, spending a good deal of his time considering the color and clarity of gemstones. This way of seeing the world has certainly informed his approach in the studio, especially in his nuanced treatment of light.
The artist’s paintings are created using encaustic, a technique he’s mastered over the last 40 years. The artist mixes his own combination of beeswax, damar resin, and pigments to achieve layers of depth and texture, resulting in unique surfaces. The process of mixing the paints is slow and deliberate, while the application of the marks is quick.
King’s works are as subtle as they are striking; uniting methodical methods with intuition, the works depict the in-between, something fleeting and ineffable. The exhibition will feature paintings, as well as small-scale and large-format works on paper, including drawings reaching nearly 5 feet in height. The drawings, made with just colored pencil on paper, highlight the artist’s sharp attention to detail and level of precision, but also his fluidity and sensitivity. The spaces depicted offer glimpses of real-world places—such as an interior or a cityscape—yet they possess an otherworldly quality.
This 59 x 45 inch colored pencil drawing on paper is from 2024, and titled Formed First.
It, along with two others of the same size, also from last year,
are in the mix of works for my exhibition “Outskirts”
opening April 23 at Anita Rogers Gallery, 494 Greenwich Street in NYC.
King received his BFA from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, and his MFA from Hunter College in New York. He also holds a Graduate Gemologist diploma from the Gemological Institute of America. For much of his career King simultaneously pursued his studio practice, primarily in painting and drawing, along with a gemological practice built on his studies of visual observation and color theory.
The artist exhibits regularly in the United States and Europe. Recently, he had a 2022 solo show at Merge Stone Ridge in New York, including a catalogue with an essay by Susan Yung and comments by Sean Elwood. A 2018 solo show took place in Geneva, Switzerland. His work can be found in numerous public and private collections, notably the Brooklyn Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, Harvard University Art Museums, Zimmerli Art Museum and the Weatherspoon Art Gallery. He is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant, and a Vermont Studio Center Artist Residency. King lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
For further information and photographs, please contact Elizabeth Thompson at [email protected], or call 347.604.2346. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday 10am – 6pm.
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Right: John McDevitt King, Inner Night, 2024, Colored pencil on paper, 26” x 22”
