Artist Statement:

Jeff Koegel combines the Japanese, wabi-sabi aesthetic of imperfection and impermanence with the idealized and perfected formal elements of western aesthetics, to offer up a counter-intuitive vision that encompasses a sweeping, cross-cultural history of technological development. This style is influenced, in part, by 19th century Japanese printmaker, Hiroshige, whose Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (scenes on the highway connecting Edo and Kyoto) captured the landscapes of a rapidly changing Japan in late Edo Period--during which the ruling Tokugawa shogunate was slowly losing a battle to preserve Japanese culture amidst pressures from Western nations to open the country to foreign trade. Though Koegel alludes to elements of this Ukiyo-e style, meaning “pictures of the floating world” or, its ironic homophone, “sorrowful world,” his paintings utilize a distinctly contemporary visual vocabulary that references mankind’s current environmental discourse. In one of Koegel’s vast, contradictory landscapes, spanning space and time, smoke stacks or volcanoes might emit noxious, billowing clouds that trace the outline of a futuristic space ship, a fantastic cityscape, an ancient temple or vascular forms that could be tree trunks, ventricles, or a cross section of metropolitan plumbing. Uniting all of these disparate elements is the artist’s color-field style of layering; the whole milieu of contradictory formal elements is fused into a holistic composition by solid fields of warm reds, oranges and yellows that suggest the heat and function of interdependent, internal organs, or cool washes of blue, white and violet that call to mind ocean and sky meeting on a distant and apparently united horizon.

"My paintings are made up of an aggregate of disparate elements - man-made things, smoke, bodily organs, chunks of landscape, abstract forms - combined in ways that don't quite fit together. I do this to suggest a hybrid, modified, engineered world created by ideas we project onto the landscape: a world constantly being built up as it erodes away - always becoming something new."

"I work in a patchwork method, where most of the painting is covered as I work on a specific area, so I can't compare what I'm painting with neighboring areas in the work. This 'blindness' intentionally allows for unintended results. The paintings may look carefully planned out, but actually I begin with only a partial drawing, which the painting is built on, altered and developed instinctively. Many areas are painted over five or six times in reaction to the emerging relationships within the composition."

 

Impression/Ism: Contemporary Urban Impressions, Brea Gallery, Brea CA (Featuring Tony Berlant, Jane Callister, Sherie Franssen, Jeff Koegel, Laura Owens, Monique Prieto and others.)

2005

Jeff Koegel: Real Estate, Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena CA

Fresh - The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles CA

Subtopia - Jeff Koegel, Pamela Grau Twena, Dana Lovell. Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Ana CA

Imaginary Spaces / Real Places - Long Beach Arts, Long Beach CA. Juried by Christopher Miles

2004

American Gothic: Talent for the Dark Ages - Gallery C, Hermosa Beach CA. Curated by Tyler Stallings

The OsCene: Contemporary Art and Culture in Orange County, Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach CA. Curated by Tyler Stallings

Scope London - Melia White House, London

Scope LA - The Standard, Hollywood CA

2003

Just One Word: Plastics - Square Blue Art, Costa Mesa CA

Square Blue Open Competition - Seven Degrees, Laguna Beach CA (Juried by Irene Hofmann, Curator of Contemporary Art, Orange County Museum of Art)

Surface - Square Blue Art, Newport Beach CA

2001

Orange County Biennial, Muckenthaler Cultural Center, Fullerton CA


Selected Collections

Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation

Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Los Angeles CA


Bibliography

2006

Squeeze OC, May 4, Teeming With Multiple Meanings, Jit Fong Chin

2005

Jeff Koegel: Real Estate exhibition catalogue, Pasadena Museum of California Art. Essays by Peter Clothier and Tyler Stallings