artists

Nice & Fit is pleased to announce David Kennedy-Cutler’s first solo exhibition in Berlin.
The show is conceived as a sensory experience in three levels.
Level 1: The main characters are two tall cacti (approx. 3 m high). David has named them “Hank” and “Kurt”, after two music icons: country troubadour Hank Williams and underground rock hero Kurt Cobain. They are extremely realistic renditions of the Saguaro cactus which means “old friend” in Native American tribes as it bears fruit and water and takes 300 years to reach full height. They are made out of simple, everyday materials such as cardboard, toothpicks and mirror mastic. “Hank” contains a portable CD-player so that the melancholy sound of country songs is echoed ad infinitum.
Level 2: Three wooden cases, deposited around the gallery and opened as if they had just been used. Each case contains an object: a single crutch and pine shavings, a zig-zag surrender flag, silk flowers. They are strange and powerful stand-ins for ‘emotional baggage’; the cases are literally heavy to carry around. It’s a display of objects that gives the impression they have been “brought over, taken from a metaphorical desert, a metaphorical frontier” as David explains.
“They are a metaphor for failure, hurt or grief, they can be carried around, as if one wouldn't want to let go of these things... they tie in with "The Desert of Envy" when I say that repetition of failure creates a climate for potential. Sometimes all we have is our failures, and sometimes this is why we make things like art. The surrender flag is a bit funny too. The flag is made of plastic bags that you get at the bodega. In New York, all the trees in the projects have these plastic bags up in the trees flapping around. I also like the idea of an American coming to Germany and planting a surrender flag. The cemetery flowers are dirty silk flowers. In the Bronx, people bring all these bright fake flower arrangements to the cemetery, and the guys who do the landscaping, rather than remove dirty, old flowers just run the lawnmower over them. So there are flowers everywhere.”
Level 3: Small oil paintings of places that incorporate delicate sculptural elements onto the surface: pine shavings, sand, cactus needles.
The work of David Kennedy-Cutler has an unsettling quality. It is unusually romantic and sometimes harsh; it is almost cinematic in its ability to evoke time and place, even a loose narrative. His thoughts and experience swirl through his sculptures and paintings to create a locus for historical reflection and human longing. This is achieved with skill, humour, simplicity and the rare ability to “hit the nail on its head”. The cacti are the characters; the cases are the artifacts from this metaphorical place; the paintings give a vague notion of the place. Let the drama unfold.