Artist comes home, buoyed by New York respect

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This article was published 09/06/2016 (3777 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Karel Funk has made extraordinary art from the most ordinary of subjects: the common hoodie.

Even more extraordinary, the Winnipeg artist’s hyper-realistic acrylic portraits have caught the eye of art collectors in one of the world’s hottest art markets, New York.

He’s had three solo shows at Manhattan’s 303 Gallery and his works have also been on display at the Big Apple’s Guggenheim and Whitney museums. They are also in the collections of museums in Montreal, Toronto, Los Angeles, Dallas, San Francisco and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

Starting Friday, it’s his hometown’s turn. The Winnipeg Art Gallery is displaying 24 of his works, including Untitled #78, a painting he put the final touches on earlier this week in his River Heights studio. Funk and the gallery unveiled it Thursday morning in a special ceremony kicking off the exhibition.

Funk is still shocked by his sudden rise in the art world. He graduated from the University of Manitoba’s fine arts program in 1997 and received his masters from New York’s Columbia University in 2003.

“I feel absolutely flattered that they’re giving me such attention,” Funk said of the WAG in an interview this week.

“I never ever once take it for granted. I can’t imagine I’ll ever get comfortable saying, ‘There’s just another painting sold.’ It’s never like that. If a painting does sell, I’m ecstatic. You don’t know that’s going to happen. There’s no guarantee. Paintings can sit around for years. Some paintings don’t sell, some paintings can sell immediately. You just never know.”

He made the risky move to New York to earn his graduate degree just two weeks before the events of 9/11, but it was a lucrative meeting with New York art-buyer and curator Jeffery Deitch in 2003 that began the transformation of a struggling artist with a mountain of student loans into a successful painter whose works have been purchased by the likes of actor Ben Stiller.

“He was doing a lot of studio visits with a lot of students and he came through to my studio and he saw a painting I was doing of a guy with big black Sennheiser headphones on and he had a yellow shirt,” Funk recalled. “He bought that painting right there, when it was just about done. He said he wanted it and that just blew me away.

“That was one of my first experiences where somebody in the New York art world and who was world-renowned was interested in one of my paintings and wanted to buy it. You would never think that would happen, so when it did it was an incredible moment.”

While his paintings are of 21st-century subjects — models wearing strategically wrinkled Gore-Tex outerwear — his technique of layering fine touches of acrylic paint on each other is influenced by Renaissance painters such as Albrecht Dürer, Funk said.

“When I moved to New York to do my MFA in 2001, I started going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Museum, all the big institutions there. Winnipeg is great, the WAG is a fantastic institution but it’s not the Met. I sort of fell in love with Renaissance portraiture and that became a huge influence in my paintings,” he said.

“The hoods have an homage to Renaissance portraiture but they’re also very contemporary jackets so they have a nice reference to contemporary life. There’s a nice bridge between the past and present.”

During modelling sessions, Funk places lights strategically to enhance the shadows the wrinkled hoodies create. It’s those fine shadows that catch the viewer’s eye.

“I’ll spend a lot of time moving the light source around to build the right highlights and shadows. That’s very important, how the shadows and highlights look. How do all the creases fold, and do they create an interesting composition? I spend a lot of time considering that when I’m photographing the model,” he said.

“Sometimes, I’ll even tape the jacket or sculpt underneath the jacket and I’ll put tissue paper or socks to keep the jacket in a certain shape I like.”

After taking many photographs, he’ll manipulate them using computer programs to create an image. Once he sees what he’s looking for, he starts sketching and painting.

The painting is so painstakingly detailed, it can take months to finish a small piece, Funk said.

“It’s a very slow process to build up all those textures,” he said. “More often than not I will even change shadows and highlights and creases of the jacket in the painting process. I feel my way through the painting as I’m painting it. It’s very important to me how those shadows and highlights and how that jacket is behaving, that’s one of my main concerns.”

His works are so painstakingly detailed that at first glance, they look more like photographs. He says the intricate brush strokes aren’t as noticeable when his paintings are reproduced in newspapers and magazines.

“When you see them in reproduction on that small scale they do look like photographs but in real life they’re actually quite painterly, you can see the brush strokes and the little hair and stubble,” Funk said. “They’re still very realistic, though.”

He hadn’t seen Blue Hood, the painting the WAG has highlighted in its promotional materials, for more than a decade, but now he sees it everywhere in town — on buses, billboards and on a giant poster hanging on the outside wall of the Memorial Boulevard gallery.

“It’s maybe 15 inches square, it’s quite small, so to see it at that scale is funny,” Funk said. “But it looks fantastic, the blue against the Tyndall stone of the building really looks good. A nice contrast.”

alan.small@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter:@AlanDSmall