Kenneth L. Showell

Artist Biography

Born in Huron, South Dakota, Kenneth L. Showell was raised in Omaha, Nebraska. He studied at the Kansas City Art Institute alongside fellow Nebraskans Dan Christensen and Keith Jacobshagen and completed his MFA at Indiana University before arriving in New York City in 1965. Once in New York, Showell set up a studio in SoHo and joined a social and artistic group of artists, including Dan Christensen, Stewart Hitch, and Carol Haerer, who earned considerable attention from critics, collectors, dealers, curators, and fellow artists into the 1980s. This painting is an example of the artist's series of acrylic spray paintings, which the artist worked on from the mid to late 1960s until around 1971. Created using an autobody paint spray gun, the artist crumpled unstretched linen on the ground and sprayed acrylic paint in layers. The resulting paintings were brightly colored gradients creating illusions of highlights and shadow. This series garnered the most critical attention and was included in the 1967 and 1969 Whitney Museum's Annual Exhibition: Contemporary American Painting and Larry Aldrich's collection and exhibition of Lyrical Abstraction paintings at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art and the Whitney Museum.