Ken Schiano is the featured artist for the September exhibition at MASSONIART. There will be an artist’s reception on First Friday, September 7 from 5 to 8 p.m. The gallery is located at 203 High Street in Chestertown. Ken’s award-winning work has been exhibited widely up and down the East Coast and is in numerous corporate and private collections. He has been exhibiting with the Carla Massoni Gallery since 1995.
Ken is known for his luminous multi-layered abstractions. In 2013, he began experimenting with new mediums and a larger scale. His shaped paintings were introduced in his one-man show at the Academy Art Museum in 2015. Art critic Mary McCoy commented in her review of the exhibition, “There are some works of art that you can look at again and again and always see something more. Ken Schiano’s paintings are a case in point. Full of impossibly angled planes and baffling color relationships, they provoke you to puzzle out what is going on and how Schiano managed to do it.”
An architect by training, he received his Bachelor of Architecture from Cooper Union. While there, Ken was exposed to the power of color by Op-Art painter, Ben Cunningham, and later by contemporary artist Wolf Kahn. Ken taught both art and architecture at the University of Kentucky and the Illinois Institute of Technology and was a partner at QA13 Architects for 25 years.
“My skills as an artist are still largely self-taught,” Ken commented. “I tend to rely heavily on architectonic principles, especially in the honest use of materials and process. My work is uncompromisingly abstract, and despite external sources, my subject matter is derived solely from the act of painting.”
In describing his work, Mary commented on his technique and medium, “By mixing his own paints from dry pigment, Schiano is able to create an incredible range of extremely subtle colors. Like a latter-day Abstract Expressionist, Schiano allows his intuition to guide him as he plays with color, texture and form.”
The front gallery at MASSONIART will be dedicated to Ken’s new body of work. Also featured are artists James Tatum, Grace Mitchell, Susan Tessem, Zemma Mastin White, Vicco von Voss and Karen Hubacher. For more information, call 410-778-7330.