New Rome at the Mark Moore Gallery

Mark Moore Gallery is pleased to present New Rome, an exhibition of new work by Kansas based artist Kris Kuksi. The exhibition marks Kuksi’s second major solo show with the gallery.

Over the last decade, Kuksi has built a career creating complex sculptures that blend antiquity with the modern world. Teeming with struggle, conflict, faith, sexuality, and power, each sculpture affords the viewer a ringside seat for a wild spectacle as the spheres of fantasy and reality collide. For this exhibition, Kuksi creates New Rome, a society rife with allegory consisting of works crafted in a hybrid style of baroque and rococo that deeply examine the human psyche. Every sculpture is created from an obsessive collection of cultural flotsam and jetsam – figurines, model parts, collectibles, craft parts, and jewelry. The final pieces, sometimes as large as 10Ft wide, are totemic like shrines that expose Kuksi’s disenchantment with the structures of power and the fallacies of man. Yet, the works are not without their romance, as the wonders of the world are presented through elaborate entaglements of miniature bears, mythical beasts, and glorious figurines. In the Los Angeles Times review of Kuksi’s 2014 exhibition David Pagel writes, “Kuksi’s Baroque confections treat history as primordial soup — a burbling stew of thrilling highlights and epic tragedies that not only resonate in the mind’s eye but also inspire all sorts of emotions — good, bad and otherwise.”

Gallery Hours:
Tuesday – Saturday 11-6, and by appointment daily