LOS ANGELES, CA.- KP Projects is presenting a solo exhibition of paintings by Vonn Sumner.

The new exhibition includes oil paintings and works on paper that present Sumner’s trademark cast of characters: idiosyncratic, costumed figures in muted colors that enact ambiguous rituals. This show includes several paintings that feature the “sock-hat” figures that Sumner invented using a re-purposed head covering made for industrial painters; the characters comprise what Sumner refers to as “The Confraternity of the Sock”— an imagined secret society, or perhaps a traveling group of performers.

There is something subversive about the paintings, as they present simultaneous opposing moods: humor and menace, expressiveness and restraint, revealing and concealing. Resonances with art history mix with references to comics, cartoons, and children’s book illustrations, as well as suggestions of mystical/spiritual traditions from cultures around the world. An air of slow disclosure hangs over the work that rewards long looking with subtle humor, painterly surfaces, and complex emotions.

Vonn Sumner is based in greater Los Angeles and is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area. He received his MFA from UC Davis where his mentor was the celebrated painter and educator Wayne Thiebaud. He has shown his work in galleries in New York, Washington DC, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and had solo museum shows at the Riverside Art Museum (CA) in 2008 and the Phillips Museum of Art (PA) in 2011. Sumner’s work has been shown internationally in Switzerland, the UK, and Italy.

His paintings have been featured/reviewed in such publications as: New American Paintings, Elle Décor, Boom magazine, Art Ltd., ArtScene, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, LA Weekly, NY Arts Magazine, Hi-Fructose, Vice, and The Painter’s Table, among others. He was a founding member of the artist collective called Pharmaka that ran a non-profit gallery in Downtown L.A. from 2004-2009.
This is the gallery’s fourth solo exhibition of Vonn Sumner’s work.