Hard Arms/Soft War

David Lewis is pleased to present the gallery’s first solo exhibition by American artist Kan Seidel. The exhibition features six new paintings and a painted clay sculpture. A centerpiece of the exhibition is Seidel’s new painting war goes crying with a million gray rats (or Gayrnica)(2023), a satirical queering of Picasso’s Guernica (1937). Kan Seidel (b. 1987, Omaha, NE) is a New York-based artist, writer and activist. Seidel moved to New York City in 2014, working primarily as a writer while painting. The death of his younger brother in 2021 led to a full and profound commitment to painting. Seidel’s first fully realized body of work, which included oil paintings and clay sculptures, debuted a year later in 2022, decoding this personal loss through a deconstruction of the human figure and family dynamics with an uncanny edge. Seidel studied creative writing at the University of Nebraska. As a queer man, he was fascinated by the repressed urges and performed normalcy of the conservative, homogeneous Midwest, and has often explored those themes through the metaphor of the family. Since living in NYC, he has applied a similar critical gaze to the distinct but parallel forms of self-suppression and group-enforced social conformity present in gay and queer urban communities. This has led him to broader psychological explorations of sexuality, gender, self-representation, self-delusion, and the universal cultural foundations of belief, bias, mind control and social programming. Seidel has recently been exhibited in several group shows in New York City, Los Angeles, CA, and East Hampton, NY. Seidel’s inaugural exhibition titled Brother Brother took place in the Fall of 2022 at the Fireplace Project in East Hampton. For fifteen years Seidel has worked closely with Precious Brady-Davis, a leading Black transgender climate activist, creating a diverse body of collaborative work including writing, photography, film and performance. For the last five years, he has been heavily involved with The Generations Project, a live storytelling non-profit organization aiming to platform and preserve intergenerational LGBTQ voices in NYC, where he coaches speakers and leads group writing and storytelling workshops. Seidel is also collaborating with trans writer Summer Minerva on drawings for a book of poetry entitled Dickmata.

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53 The Circle, East Hampton

Hamptons, NY