Kenneth Showell died in the Spring of 1997 at the age of 58. He left behind 30 years’ worth of work — nearly 200 canvases, plus hundreds of watercolors, pastels, and sketches — all carefully stored and documented. Showell is best known for the paintings he produced in the mid ’60s to early ’70s. His work, alongside other significant artists of that time, played a crucial role in the critical debates concerning abstract painting in the late 1960s.
The son of a sheet metal worker, Kenneth Leroy Showell was born in 1939 in Huron, South Dakota and grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. After receiving his B.F.A. at the Kansas City Art Institute and an M.F.A. from Indiana University he moved to New York City in 1965, setting up a studio in SoHo. Ken’s work garnered significant attention and was included in numerous museum exhibitions and private collections.
The late 1960s to the early 1970s was a period characterized by a frenzied search for what was still possible, and Kenneth Showell was someone curators, collectors, and other artists were following. He was represented by the prestigious David Whitney Gallery which featured the work of painters such as Dan Christiansen, Mary Heilmann, Ronnie Landfield, Pat Lipsky, and David Reed. These artists were coming to be critically grouped under the heading Lyrical Abstraction, a term coined by the collector Larry Aldrich to describe those painters who were moving away from the "geometric, hard-edge, and minimal, toward more lyrical, sensuous, romantic abstractions in colors which are softer and more vibrant.”
Showell had a reputation for making paintings that had a sense of spontaneity, sensuousness and opticality. His work in the late 1960s to early 1970s represents a high point for post-Abtract Expressionist painting by the mixing of multiple approaches. Ken was among a group of young painters whose works sought to be unorthodox in their mingling of color-field’s concern with post-Minimalism’s emphasis on process and materiality.
In this period, he was best known for his spray paintings which had the trompe l’oeil effect of appearing wrinkled when the canvas was flat. Ken credited his younger brother Don, an auto-body worker, with teaching him how to operate a spray gun. He used this simple tool to create large scale works by balling up sections of canvas, spraying them with paint, drying and stretching them, then repeating the process. His distinctive approach earned inclusion in the 1967 and 1969 Annual Exhibition: Contemporary American Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Showell was also included in the Whitney’s 1971 Lyrical Abstraction exhibition, and many other important group shows and surveys of contemporary painting. This method of spray painting canvasses is utilized by artists today.
A prolific painter interested in exploration and innovation, Showell left behind the spray-painted canvas in early 1971 because, as he put it in an oral history interview, the process “quit being a surprise.” He began to explore alternative strategies and motifs. These abstract works, made in the late ’70s to early ’80s, retain his interest in color, surface, opticality, and an emphasis on process. Showell appears to have intuited the pictorial turn that abstract painting would take in the post-Modern era. Retaining his baroque aesthetic, he continues to work in a non-systemic manner, producing a series of paintings and works on paper that employ distorted grids, linear elements, and irregular overlaid geometric forms.
In watercolors, Showell continued his explorations with color, working out chromatic relationships in contrast to one another. Ribbons and amorphous shapes are juxtaposed or are layered in compositions reminiscent of his work from the late ’60s. Ken eventually returned to works on canvas at the end of the ’70s and into the ’80s. The softer lyrical edges of his early work had solidified into stiffer, hard-edge groupings of parallel lines. His palette resembled the color sensibility of the late ’70s and early ’80s with Ken’s uncanny ability as a colorist to harmonize each scheme. Much of this work seems to be a precursor to the eclectic approach to abstract painting in the mid ’80s.
Showell established a career as a photographer almost by accident. Ken photographed his own artwork for documentation purposes. Other artists felt he was able to capture a work of art and its intention perfectly and began asking him if he would photograph their work. He was known as enthusiastic and supportive, an artists’ artist who loved painting and fine art above all else. As time went on, enough galleries and artists asked him to photograph works that a parallel career emerged for him.
As an in-demand photographer chronicling artworks, Ken could see everything that was going on in the studios and galleries of New York City. By working with the exactness of photography and capturing the likeness of the artworks he became interested in the representation of what was before him. Around this time, contrary to the trends he was seeing in the galleries around him, he began to feel the pull of a greater challenge, Ken’s work began to change. He slowly became disinterested in constantly having to set his own terms, a byproduct when painting abstractly. Ken, a conceptual painter, became more and more enamored with the idea of how you represent the real. He began to infuse his conceptual basis into his investigation of nature and to the landscape.
In the 1980s Showell’s interest in capturing landscapes and still lifes led him to an exploration of computer generated and video imagery as a means to a creative end. He would bring a Hi-8 video camera to Central Park, focus the camera on scenes he wanted to paint, and record until the tape would end. He later returned to his studio in Chinatown and painted directly from the image captured on videotape. The process gave his paintings a quality of motion even though his subjects, a skyline or a tree, were inherently static.
Ken’s 30-year history as a painter is marked by his remarkable ability to handle color, regardless of the subject or process. His abstract work occurred in a very vibrant and vital period in American abstract development and continues to gain attention, appearing in group exhibitions and museum collections. As part of abstract painting’s collective unconsciousness, Showell’s influence is sustained as evident in the exhibition High Times, Hard Times curated by Katy Siegel in 2006 and shows such as the Akron Art Museum’s The Fabricators. No matter what form the visual took, for Showell there was always a consistency of conceptual thought and color resonance that makes his work unique.
