Marlborough opens a solo exhibition of new paintings by the London-based artist Ansel Krut
(Artdaily.org)

Marlborough is presenting Back to Back Balloons, a solo exhibition of new paintings by the London-based artist Ansel Krut. The show is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog with an essay by Barry Schwabsky which is excerpted below. A painted image can be at once blunt and ambiguous. That is its sometimes troubling power: a demonstration that what you feel and what you know may never be entirely in synch. At least until recently, Ansel Krut’s paintings have tended to exemplify this disquieting ambiguity in a very particular way: a heavy, dark outlining of forms seems to speak the candid, ingenuous language of cartoons and graffiti; but the richly layered, smokily atmospheric color, often dominated by earth tones and distinctly moody in character, shows that Krut is no Pop artist, and still less an eighties-style neo-expressionist, but an artist earnestly involved in the traditional craft of oil painting and