Karel Funk

Karel Funk’s inaugural solo exhibition at Miles McEnery Gallery continues his exploration of the hood as a contemporary form of portraiture, shifting focus away from the individual beneath the garment and toward an investigation of the materiality of the garment itself.

Through intricate detail and iridescent color, the works explore the interplay of figuration, abstraction, geometry, and perception. Funk’s figures dwell in the ambiguous space between the seen and unseen. In these paintings, the familiar and ordinary—an isolated hood—takes on a haunting, sacred reverence.

Funk’s process can only be understood through hours of manipulating, photographing, Photoshopping, and then meticulously transferring the digital image into a painted one. In the essay, “Karel Funk Has Been Painting the Same Subject for Decades. He’s Still Making Discoveries,” Katie White shares how Funk’s latest show is “a deliberate reduction from the larger formats he’s used in the past, meant to sharpen the work’s intensity. Yet within that discipline, the paintings feel more uncanny than ever, and are the embodiment of a decades-long pursuit.” White goes on to share how Funk explained: “The work has become more about this same thing: to be complex, super detailed, formally dynamic, but as pure, simple, and clean as possible.”

Karel Funk (b. 1971 in Winnipeg, Canada) received his Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University, New York, NY and his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada.

Funk has been the subject of solo exhibitions at 303 Gallery, New York, NY; Blouin Division, Montreal, Canada; Jessica Silverman, San Francisco, CA; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver, Canada; Rochester Art Center, Rochester, MN; Stems Gallery, Brussels, Belgium; and was the subject of a major museum retrospective at Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg, Canada.

He has also been involved in notable group exhibitions at Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; La Maison Rouge de Fondation Antoine de Galbert, Paris, France; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Lyon, France; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal, Canada; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY; Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg, Canada; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others.

His work may be found in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal, Canada; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and Winnipeg Art Gallery, Winnipeg, Canada.

Funk lives and works in Winnipeg, Canada.