Yehonatan Koenig will present his first solo exhibition of his ink on paper works at The B.A.G (2030 Hyperion Ave., Los Angeles, CA. 90039) with an opening reception for the artist on Friday, February 3, 2023 at 7:00pm.
Yehonatan Koenig is a Los Angeles based artist who works with ink and rag paper creating meditations on the harmonic relationships between form and formlessness. The art of Yehonatan Koenig is a subatomic soiree, every mark-making molecule involved in contributing to a higher purpose along the way. The interplay between patterns and the possibilities that emerge from them is suggestive of mathematical models and expressions of natural forms, from migratory swarms, hives, and topography to celestial patterns. The stillness from which form is in an eternal process of being born and destroyed. The work is characterized by a sense of energetic movement: dark and light, being and dissolution, contraction and expansion.
Koenig states, “I make art to witness tension and harmonic relationships between form and formlessness. These relationships surprise and delight me with the fleeting and changing nature of beauty and meaning. Every piece grows out from additive generative mark making while I consciously steer away from pictorial recognition is a meditation on the event horizon between the thing and the no-thing where sublime beauty is created and destroyed in an instant.”
Koenig’s art is a melange of influences too discrete to unearth and then piece back together. In his most recent work, with influences of the great abstract master Mark Tobey. There was a point where the abstract expressionists diverged in whether thought or nature were the underpinnings of a great painting. Tobey was on the side of nature; perhaps Koenig’s drawings are taking what Tobey’s elegant calligraphic compositions accomplished and merging it all with the precise tension of Bridget Riley and the universally appealing geometry of Victor Vasarely. The result of this unites possibilities of thought, of the cerebral, with natural, raw form, an achievement wrought from the marriage of discipline and desire, an art of the complex in service to simplicity.
There is form and structure revealed here, an elegant point in the digressions of a thousand or more marks, each its own act of lending to the whole. This is an art of celebrating the chance to be part of something so much larger than one’s self. The result of the effort is image, subject, liberated form, universal connection, take your pick, the artist is fast at work at either a unified field theory of everything or a discombobulation of ordinary expectations. And with each drawing, perhaps both.
In these Ink renderings, chaos springs forth life, capturing the beauty that comes from what is “known” and “unknown.” We may be observing the fundamental workings of the universe. Abstract forms suggest the ebb, flow, and pulsing of life – from the tiniest cell, to the grandest cosmos. These microcosms offer the viewer a meditation on the ways in which life is mutable and emerging as a fundamental process of destruction and creation.
Born in Israel and raised in New York City, Yehonatan Koenig received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1989 and an MFA from Hunter College in 1992. Koenig is a polymath, art director, entrepreneur, engineer, inventor, immersive event producer and musician. For 30 years bringing digital arts, themed entertainment and technology to life, co-authoring real time rendering technology patents; Art directing dozens of computer games, and designing attractions working with Disney Interactive & Imagineering, Microsoft, Juniper Networks, DreamWorks Animation, Electronic Arts, Sony, Vivendi-Universal, just to name a few. Koenig’s work was recognized in AD week NY 2014, winning Best Mobile Creative selected by Mobile Media Summit: OMMA Best In Show, All Categories, Members Choice, OMMA – Best Mobile Marketing.
Opening Reception for the Artist: Friday, February 3, 2023 @ 7-10pm
Closing Reception for the Artist: Friday, February 17, 2023 @ 7-10pm
www.yehonatankoenig.com
https://www.instagram.com/y.koenig.creates/
