- Aug 12

Iris Kufert-Rivo

Iris Kufert-Rivo is a geometric painter who has a studio in Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, New Jersey and represented by Billis Williams Gallery in Los Angeles and L’Space Gallery in New York City. She has exhibited extensively across the United States and has participated in over 50 exhibitions to date since 2003, including 11 solo exhibits. Recent solo exhibitions include Hidell Brooks Gallery in Charlotte, George Billis Gallery in Los Angeles, and Dune in New York. Most of Iris’ group exhibitions have been concentrated in New York City, Jersey City, Los Angeles, and Florida. Iris has curated a handful of exhibits in New York, Jersey City and has been published in various gallery catalogues of exhibitions she has participated in such as The Painting Center and Flux Gallery in New York, as well as the Morris Museum and Victory Arts Projects in New Jersey.

The geometric paintings depict various juxtaposing rectangles meant to reflect symbolic representations of urban settings. Within these rectangles are triangles which are fleshed out through shades of colors passing through the geometry. Some areas remain intentionally flat, such as the negative space, while the rest of composition resemble building blocks of abstracted visual metaphors for urban architecture such as skyscrapers or residential apartment buildings.

These vibrant paintings reflect a sense of suspension as the various represented geometry fly through the air in numerous angles asymmetrically from one another. Iris’ palette typically portrays pastel and neutral tones composed in a way to not reflect natural or representational resemblance. The condensed nature of the paintings gives off a sense of claustrophobia as Iris’ inspirations for the works were her state of mind during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020. Being indoors constantly changes an individual’s state of mind, which the paintings reflect through the disorderly construction and assemblage of the building block-like forms erratically integrating with one another.

Turbine (pictured above) remains Iris’ most unique painting out of her entire portfolio. The painting comes from a different series than the rest of the paintings in the article known as Ribbon, the rest of the paintings included in the essay are from the series Totem. Containing rhomboids instead of rectangles, these slanted quadrilaterals are composed in a manner as if they were shards of broken glass. These fragments center on an earthy abstracted form assembled with various geometry. The painting elicits feelings of destruction or composed and orderly chaos through portrayals of composed and complex asymmetrical composition. What breaks the tension would be the pale cyan-colored negative space background which offers a break from the busyness of the center construction. A compounded work which reflects both static stimulation and flatness simultaneously.

Iris Kufert-Rivo’s paintings convey emotions such as isolation and idleness but with pop art aesthetic qualities reflecting a contemporary version of cubism. Like Piet Mondrian, Iris’ art can be described as difficult to classify. While containing the flat forms of color field painting, the works are too complex to resemble such classification. Although the paintings are abstract and contain aspects of minimalism with the purity of forms, the works are too geometrical and compositionally busy for either description as well. ‘Urban painting’ may be the best explanation of Iris’ process and concept. Iris Kufert-Rivo revels in blurring the lines of contemporary conceptual categorization and redefining the purpose of geometry in postmodern painting applications.