On view through September 1, 2024
Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College
McCaffree Gallery, Second Floor
Free and Open to the Public
Blooming trees on fire. Silhouettes of children are voids filled with stars. Everything is accidental, nothing is accidental. Figures become the landscape, are of the landscape, return to the landscape and are absorbed back by it. Attempts at repair, the need to be forgiven, an inability to forgive. An intuition that things are animated by a mysterious force that is both brutal and beautiful to the point of the unbearable. A sea of grief underneath it all. Birds that are miraculously the colors of rainbows, drops of dew shimmering like crystals on the morning grass. An aging man smelling flowers. A figure in the snow forgetting his past for a moment. Endlessly changing seasons. – Misha Kligman
This exhibition will feature approximately 14 paintings made over the past five years. Kligman is interested in the poetic potential of often mysterious connections between seemingly unrelated objects and events. In this body of work, driven in large part by mystical encounters with nature, Kligman presents visions tangled with premonitions, while dreams and reality collide to reveal the luminous in the given.
Misha Kligman was born in Kazan, Soviet Union, in 1978, and immigrated to the U.S. with his family as a refugee in 1995. He received his B.A. in Art from Cleveland State University (Cleveland, Ohio) in 2001 and his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Kansas in 2009. Kligman is a recipient of the 2015 Charlotte Street Visual Art Fellowship and completed a three-year residency at Studios INC, Kansas City. Kligman is a founding member of PLUG Projects, where he served as a co-director from 2011 to 2016. During Kligman’s time with PLUG Projects, the gallery received funding from the Francis Family Foundation, Arts KC and a Rocket Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation, Spencer Museum of Art, and Charlotte Street Foundation. Kligman’s work has been published in New American Paintings and exhibited at the H&R Block Artspace (Kansas City, Missouri), Haw Contemporary (Kansas City, Missouri), the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, Kansas), and Elmhurst Art Museum (Elmhurst, Illinois). Kligman lives and works in Kansas City, Missouri, and is currently an Associate Professor of Art at the Johnson County Community College.
